This hilarious novel of a helicopter mom and dad is ';a near-flawless caricature of 21st-century upper-middle-class parenthood' (Publishers Weekly). Alice never imagined she would end up like this, so anxious after hearing about the dangers of meteorites that she makes her children wear bike helmets in the wading pool. Her husband, David, has taught their four-year-old to list every animal represented in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf. But the more they push their children, the more things there are to worry about. It seems no amount of gluten rationing or herbal teas can improve their children's intellectual development, and as Alice's eldest child looks set to fail her entrance exam for the exclusive private school on which her parents have pinned all their hopes, Alice decides to take matters into her own hands. With a baseball cap pulled low over her face, Alice shuffles into a hall of two hundred kids and takes the test in place of her daughter, her first exam in twenty years. From one of Britain's bestselling comic novelists, praised by the New York Times for ';a tart narrative voice and a delectably understated way with wisecracks,' May Contain Nuts is a provocative satire of the manic world of today's hypercompetitive, overprotective families.
O'Farrell is a consistently humorous writer with an acute ear for the absurdities of middle class pretension. It's hard to fault his satire on competitive parenting or his conclusions regarding social inequalities Mail on Sunday
O'Farrell is one of the best contemporary satirists in the business and he has middle class pushy mothers down to a tee in this latest toe-curling, hackle-rising chronicle of hyper-parenting... The one-liners are sublime and the comedic situations utterly hilarious. Don't miss this Daily Record
O'Farrell has scored a bullseye with this satirical salvo... Taps into Middle England's neuroses with terrific wit The Herald
Author
About John O'farrell
John O'Farrell is the author of four novels: The Man Who Forgot His Wife, May Contain Nuts, This Is Your Life and The Best a Man Can Get. His novels have been translated into over twenty languages and have been adapted for radio and television. He has also written two best-selling history books: An Utterly Impartial History of Britain and An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain, as well as a political memoir, Things Can Only Get Better and three collections of his column in The Guardian. A former comedy scriptwriter for such productions as Spitting Image, Room 101, Murder Most Horrid and Chicken Run, he is founder of the satirical website NewsBiscuitand can occasionally be spotted on such TV programmes as Grumpy Old Men, Question Time and Have I Got News for You.