Sour Grapes

Dan Rhodes is the author of several novels and story collections including Anthropology: And a Hundred Other Stories (2000), Timoleon Vieta Come Home (2003) and When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow (2014). He was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003, has won a number of literary prizes, including the E.M. Forster Award, and was named one of the Evening Standard’s ‘People Who Make London Swing’ despite never actually living there.

Sour grapes? Oddly not. The narrative tone here is peculiarly benign, as if to explain all these absurdities as helpfully as possible, and the effect is just hilarious. I read this novel right through the day I got my hands on it, laughing like a banshee’ David Sexton, Sunday Times; ‘Piercing and hilarious’ The Times, Best Books of 2021; ‘A book trade romp. The plot is amusingly preposterous’‍ The Spectator; ‘Deeply silly, frequently juvenile’ New Statesman; ‘No one in the publishing industry escapes a brutal skewering in this laugh-out-loud satire. I loved it’‍ Sara Lawrence, Daily Mail; ‘The funniest book since Cold Comfort Farm’ Julie Burchill; ‘A rollicking satire of publishing, writers and book festivals. As broad as the Atlantic but filled with zingers’ Ian Rankin; ‘Dan Rhodes is a true original’‍ Hilary Mantel; ‘Dan Rhodes is totally sick and brilliant in all the right ways’ Douglas Coupland; ‘Dan Rhodes is one of England’s greatest purveyors of eccentric comedies’ John Self, The Times