Amazon.co.uk Review
One of the most impressive things about
Wilt in Nowhere is that Tom Sharpe manages to go on being outrageous and funny after such a long career--after all, what does a satirist do when real world lifestyles and events exceed his wildest earlier inventions? The answer is, of course, that he just goes on making wonderful things up--this is the first novel about his quietly stroppy, lazy-as-hell college lecturer hero Wilt for 20 years, and Wilt is as funny in an era of e-mail and NHS cuts as he was back then.
There is also a gentle nostalgia in some of the writing here. Wilt's hike through the English countryside in early chapters has pastoral charm in patches as well as a sarcastic sense of rural dereliction. Sharpe's sense of rural American life is rather more broad-brush, but the damage inflicted on an obnoxious millionaire by Wilt's four terrifying daughters shows a sense of just how power works.
This is a gentler book than some of Sharpe's satires, but he still has all of his bitter irony intact; this is not the book of someone who has mellowed in later life. --Roz Kaveney
Review
"'Britain's leading practitioner of black humour' - Punch; 'Tom Sharpe serves up the loudest laughs in literary comedy... He is the great post-Waugh humorist, the Wodehouse who dares plunge into the bottomless vulgarity and hysteria of our times, and a rattling good companion on a train journey.' - Mail on Sunday; 'The funniest novelist writing today' - Times; 'The best of British farce-masters is back' - Mail on Sunday"
Twenty years have elapsed since the last appearance of Tom Sharpe's legendary comic creation, lecturer Henry Wilt, but fans of the series have been rewarded for their patience with another exquisitely crafted farce. Wilt's wife and quads have gone to America to visit relatives, leaving our hero to embark on a journey of discovery in the English countryside. With the sun at his back and a whisky flask on his hip, Wilt is at ease with the world but the feeling surely cannot last. Soon, the US authorities suspect Mrs. Wilt of drug-running, the four girls seem bent on destroying their uncle's business, and Henry himself is lying unconscious following an encounter with a thorn bush. A fuller synopsis would risk spoiling surprises but suffice to say that sado-masochism, arson, and a member of the Shadow Cabinet are involved and you will recognise that we are firmly in Tom Sharpe territory. Sharpe has drawn a gallery of spectacularly unsympathetic characters, inviting the reader to revel in the unravelling of their lives. Some may find the language and situations offensive but devotees and open-minded newcomers will find much to enjoy. (Kirkus UK)
See all Product Description