Product Description

George Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. 'The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.' Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased - as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind. The way these damaged people fall apart - and come together - as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon's disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1620 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Evening Standard: Rev'd Catherine Shoard
`It's a resolutely unpretentious read: drily, almost flatly funny,
but with a deep, sharp humanity...'

The Independent
One of the '50 best holiday reads'

The Daily Telegraph
'[a] comedy of suburban manners'

Customer Reviews

The Curiously Good Second Novel
Mark Haddon, damn him, has written a second novel which is better than the first. It isn't LIKE the first one, the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, so ignore the reviewers below who seem to think that like a brand name, an author's name should guarantee an identical experience every time. This time Haddon approaches a superficially ordinary family, perhaps like yours or mine, and goes into the little crises and difficulties which make family life so hard to bear. Dad may be an alcoholic, may be a hypochondriac, may be going mad.... you make your own decision as you read his narrative of the family going through weddings, arrivals and departures, illnesses and just day to day coping. But the style is distinctively, freshly, hilariously Haddon and very recognisable as the work of the same hand.

A riotously funny look into the lives of ordinary people
This book has been criticized by some reviewers because its characters are too ordinary. This is the very quality that makes the book such a delight for me. The book exposes a family dealing with aging and retirement, a homosexual son, marriage and relationship difficulties and the opinions of the world around them. The dilemmas faced by these ordinary characters are familiar to us all, but Haddon's humorous and insightful treatment of them can be quite thought-provoking.

The book is riotously funny. Haddon's metaphors and similes alone will have you in stitches and dying to try them out yourself to show what a witty conversationalist you are. Let me give you an example:

"George could do the bluff repartee about cars and sport if pressed. But it was like being a sheep in the nativity play".

A thoroughly enjoyable read. You will finish it in a few nights.

I laughed the whole way through
Hillarious! Couldn't put it down. I don't give it five stars, because this book is LOADED with schmaltz, but it was the funniest thing I have read in ages. Even to the point of laughing out loud, to my wife's annoyance. I enjoyed it as much as Haddon's more famous "The Curious Incident ..."

The four members of his family are outwardly normal, leading conventional lives, but their personal crises are all brought together in a fast-paced farce. Haddon is very good at drawing out his characters. You are bound recognise aspects of them in yourself or others around you. Pain, swearing, sexual escapades and a surprising yet believable sequence of events are interspersed with the jokes right from the off. This is a much more sophisticated read than a summary of the plot can convey.

The chapters dealing with George's (the father) crises were to my (perhaps twisted) mind the funniest. For me the humour came from seeing how his tortured logic and thinking processes produced behaviour which seemed normal to him, but outrageous to those around him.

George fears that he is suffering from either a nervous breakdown or from depression. In fact, although his behaviour is shocking, given the devastating circumstances George must confront, the reader feels some empathy for his position, even respect for his responses.

It will have you turning the pages quickly and not wanting to be disturbed till you finish, and then that feeling you get at the end of a good book, satisfaction tempered with disappointment that there is no more to be had.