Carol Birch’s Booker-longlisted novel will delight anyone who’s read Dickens or Melville or any of their contemporary imitators and wants a cross between a Bildungsroman and a good old adventure yarn. Or at least it will for the first half of the book anyway. The narrator, Jaffy Brown, a mix of Oliver Twist, Ishmael and […]
Archive | August, 2011
Ed Reiss, Your Sort (Smith/Doorstop) £9.95
Ed Reiss’s first book-length collection, Your Sort, is a wonderful addition to a body of English humorous writing that started with Edward Lear, and Lewis Carroll and ends up in the Mighty Boosh having come via the Goon Show, but also the warm ‘Englishness’ of Men from the Ministry, and Round the Horne. And Reiss […]