Product Description

The e-mail home is an essential part of every gap-year back-packers journey. Where once the news of narrowly surviving a bus crash on the dirt-roads of India, waking up to gunfire in Honduras or fending off marriage proposals from complete strangers would have would have made it home only on the back of a slow-moving battered postcard, these days those tantalising details and terrible mistakes are now recorded immediately and distributed liberally for every friend and family member to wince at. In "Don't Tell Mum", Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk have collected together the funniest, most surreal, most alarming gap-year e-mails into a treasure-trove of correspondence. Accompanied by their wicked commentary, "Don't Tell Mum" gives the aspiring traveller the low-down on what not to do when trotting the globe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8335 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Review
"'Hilarious' Daily Mail 'I would love to do a gap year so I could contribute to this hilarious and terrifying book' Sandi Toksvig"

About the Author
SIMON HOGGART writes a weekly diary for the Guardian, for which he also writes a daily parliamentary sketch. He also writes about wine and TV for the Spectator. EMILY MONK is a first year student at Trinity College, Dublin. She has just completed her gap-year travels.

Customer Reviews

Adventure on every page
This wonderful book takes you on some incredible journeys, often hilarious, sometimes very moving. The E mails are invigorating and full of energy and humour and they make you want to rush out with a backpack and have some of these extraordinary experiences for yourself. Not to be missed by anyone who loves an adventure. At the same time I found the book thought provoking as it allows you to visit a multitude of places in the company of the gappers who are are seeing the world with fresh eyes.

Christmas Must-Have
Honestly, this is one of the funniest and unique books I have bought this year.
Hoggart and his new accomplice are witty and cynical, bringing this collection of genuine and terrifying emails to life.
Perfect present for anyone who likes a laugh-out-loud easy read.
You really should buy this book.

Decent couple of hours read...
This book, although really only a collection of e-mails, provides some good laughs and a rather interesting read, if a very short one at that...

My only problem with this is book is that really it seems to be mostly a copy and paste job - there is a foreword and a couple of lines introducing each email, with a couple of pages of gap year e-mailing 'guidelines' at the back which are really only common sense. Although there is some funny content here, it's nothing too memorable or overly hilarious. Unfortunately there also seem to be a bit of filler here(amazing for such a small book!) e-mails which are neither interesting nor funny, remarkable nor extraordinary. It's almost as though this was prepared in a rush or published before they had enough content to make it the fantastic book it had the potential to be - it's a shame.