'A painful funny humane novel: beautifully written, addictively readable and so confident' The Times
Discover this brilliantly comic and moving bestselling novel by the award-winning author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Porpoise.
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.
The 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 way he cares for her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by the way the wedding planning gets in the way of her 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.
Mark Haddon is an author, illustrator and screen-writer who has written fifteen books for children and won numerous prizes, including two BAFTAs. He lives in Oxford. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the South Bank Show Book Award, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea was published in 2005. His most recent adult novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in 2006. David Fickling Books is publishing BOOM! in autumn of 2009, a rewrite of his children's book, Gridzbi Spudvetch.
