Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8272 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
'Outstanding, hugely satisfying, exceptionally well-executed ... An incisive, urgent, funny and snappily written novel' Sunday Times Magazine'As impressively confident as Donna Tartt's The Secret History and as technically dazzling as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections ... Exceptional, funny, radical' Telegraph'Brilliant, funny, stomach-turningly accurate' Observer

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
It's a long time since I've read a novel so painfully funny, or so absurdly true

Sunday Times
Outstanding ... incisive, urgent, funny and snappily written ... The comedy debut of the year

Customer Reviews

That's how to write a book
I don't want to give the wrong impression; this is not a thriller, but finishing it somehow left me breathless. On reflection, it's the way you're sucked into the world of characters: warts and all characters, with possibly more bad points than good; they become your companions, and leaving them brings on a feeling of being wrenched away. The skill of the author brings life to seemingly mundane events, and they end up interesting because you're intrigued just as much as the advertising agency emplotees you are reading about.
The pace is nimble and the style sublime; I don't want to say much else but read it and enjoy.

Then we didn't laugh but we enjoyed it anyway
A lot of people have been very disappointed with this book and I think it is partly down to the misleading blurbs used on the cover. Many of the quotes suggest that the book is a comedy. People buying this book might expect to be laughing out loud on the bus but it just isn't that kind of comedy. It's more the kind of well oberved comedy that makes you think "hmm, that's true." In other words the not funny type of comedy. I never felt the need to laugh once.

That said I enjoyed the book. The point of view is an interesting one. It is written from the first person plural (we). This makes the narrator seem like a hive mind in the style of Star Trek's the Borg. Though this hive is not made up of super intelligent and efficient aliens but gossipy simpletons.

We did become interested in the characters and cared about what happened to them but although the book seems to be building up to a dramatic conclusion then we came to the end and it just fizzled out.

So forgettable I accidentally bought it twice
I will read almost anything, but I've repeatedly failed to finish this book. It's hard to care about anyone or anything in it! It's very tedious. Rather amusingly, it's so forgettable that after buying it (on a bookshop's recommendation), not finishing it, and setting it aside for charity, I found I had a second copy in my charity box, also bookmarked about a third of the way through, clearly unfinished.