- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (12 May 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0297849026
- ISBN-13: 978-0297849025
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.4 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,156,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
'[T]he best thing I've read in ages... It made me laugh out loud on the Underground.' (Louise Welsh )
'A deliciously morish, magic potion of a book. Wonderfully strange, funny and capricious.' (Laura Marney )
'Loads of assurance, buckets of colour, packed with beautifully etched observation and piles of raw honesty - this is a debut novel that keeps you wide-eyed with admiration...this rollicking, unsentimental tale is a great downpayment on Brooks's career. I loved its bravura, its infiltration of the characters' drives and foibles. A compact gem.' (Tom Adair THE SCOTSMAN (14.5.05) )
'It's a strange, funny and capricious book - it will make you sad, but it will also make you laugh out loud.' (BELFAST TELEGRAPH (14.5.05) )
'There is a witch's heart beating at the bottom of Nick Brooks; debut novel...the novel does...clever things with the oral tradition. Fireside tales are cleverly re-worked for grim 1980s Glasgow...accomplished.' (Peter John Meiklem BIG ISSUE IN SCOTLAND (5.5.05) )
'Nick Brooks's entertaining first novel explores the experience of being an outsider looking in, the sense of never quite getting the hang of life. Stylishly written, it has some hilariously quirky moments, but the core subject matter is painful - a strangely isolated urban childhood.' (Jennie Renton SUNDAY HERALD (19.6.05) )
'A deliciously morish, magic potion of a book. Wonderfully strange, funny and capricious.' (Laura Marney )
'Loads of assurance, buckets of colour, packed with beautifully etched observation and piles of raw honesty - this is a debut novel that keeps you wide-eyed with admiration...this rollicking, unsentimental tale is a great downpayment on Brooks's career. I loved its bravura, its infiltration of the characters' drives and foibles. A compact gem.' (Tom Adair THE SCOTSMAN (14.5.05) )
'It's a strange, funny and capricious book - it will make you sad, but it will also make you laugh out loud.' (BELFAST TELEGRAPH (14.5.05) )
'There is a witch's heart beating at the bottom of Nick Brooks; debut novel...the novel does...clever things with the oral tradition. Fireside tales are cleverly re-worked for grim 1980s Glasgow...accomplished.' (Peter John Meiklem BIG ISSUE IN SCOTLAND (5.5.05) )
'Nick Brooks's entertaining first novel explores the experience of being an outsider looking in, the sense of never quite getting the hang of life. Stylishly written, it has some hilariously quirky moments, but the core subject matter is painful - a strangely isolated urban childhood.' (Jennie Renton SUNDAY HERALD (19.6.05) )
Laura Marney
'A deliciously morish, magic potion of a book. Wonderfully strange, funny and capricious.'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Written from the perspective of Denise who is our 9 year old witness to her family's dysfunction, this is a really brave first novel. Denise is a strange child who chooses to disconnect from the adult world around her - she believes her Granny's spooky stories about murders and witchcraft and thinks her dead Grandfather is living behind a wall. She collects strange items, worries about stray cats and finds her first love with another local outcast. The plot is fairly straightforward - Denise grows up in a quietly violent community. The penmanship is brilliant - the story moves back and forward in time, circling around itself, so that the time-line of the narrative moves back and forwards. The voices used by the author are incredibly evocative; I heard this book as much as I read it. In terms of characterisation, Denise and Granny are particularly well written but I didn't get the same sense of understanding of her sister, Alison and its only at the end that you get a glimpse into the life of the mother and father and their story. I think this is a book that demands a second read to get the most out of it. Well done, Nick Brooks and I look forward to the next one.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I laughed out loud more than once while reading this book, yet there are moments of extreme sadness, saved from sentimentality by Nick Brooks' lightness of touch. Denise is quirky yet recognisable, and all of the characters are sympathetically written. This is the kind of book that it's dangerous to pick up - once you do, everything else gets forgotten. An excellent first novel. I can't wait to read the next one.
Format:Paperback
Nick Brooks has come up trumps with this, his debut novel. We follow the enigmatic Denise Forrester through a turbulent childhood peppered with family trauma, emotional upheaval and vivid imaginative decoration. There are sure to be many girls and women who identify rather strongly with Denise's character; a constant source of worry to her family and ridicule to her schoolmates, the archetypal "outcast" - but as the book progresses and she grows up we come to know her more and more intimately where her fellow characters don't, through her reactions to events in her life. Brooks' writing is gorgeously evocative, bringing the West of Scotland setting to lucid life, and the story weaves in and out of itself, jumping between times and places suddenly but never awkwardly, drawing the reader into Denise's idiosyncratic, but all too familiar, world. This is a great book that deals with the upheaval of growing up beautifully.
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