Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76228 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Tim Lott, Evening Standard
`Completely barmy, and rather dementedly appealing'

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail
`Speak for England is consistently inventive and entertaining'

Clemency Burton-Hill, Observer
"Speak for England gets progressively more amusing and intelligent throughout… The tone of the narrative is pitch-perfect"

Customer Reviews

James Hawes...
Once again the guy grasps the zeitgeist and does something new and unexpected with it - for my money the best and most underrated popular novelist we have. A great book which subtly contrasts the false images of 'the good old days' with the equally pernicious lies about how great life is now. As in 'White Merc' etc, Hawes remains concerned about the gap between the shiny lives the media constantly present as the norm and the stressed-out relative failures we all feel ourselves to be. Very talented, insightful writer, shamefully ignored IMHO.

Side-splitting
Hilarious parody of an English teacher who takes part in a depraved reality tv show. He ends up stumbling across a tribe of forgotten plane crash survivors from the 1950s. It really is an hilarious book that had me laughing out loud just reading the blurb.

A spiffing story
So what would happen if we took a groups of 1950s public school educated men and women, brought up on a diet of Eagle comics and scouting manuals, empire and reds under the beds, and dropped them into Noughties Britain: the last surviving bastion of imperial "Great Britain" unceremoniously dumped into the right-on politically correct chaos of Cool Brittania?

That's the basic premise of this story and it is done very well; very snappy and very funny. The whole story is relayed through our anti-hero, Brian Marley, a mid-life, intellectually unchallenged, emotionally abandoned and permanently destitute English teacher. When the opportunity arises to win a fortune by surviving the latest, and most depraved, reality TV show he decides his life is too dull to miss the chance. He wins the show of course, due only to the onset of temporary insanity, and so begins an hilarious chain of events that has profound consequences for the thinly disguised New Labour party back home in blighty.

Definitely worth the read.