Falling Sideways (Hardcover)

Nerdish hero David Perkins falls in love with a girl in a painting, Philippa, who was burned as a witch 400 years ago. By amazing coincidence a lock of her hair comes up for auction. By totally staggering coincidence, David remembers a seedy London shop called HONEST JOHN'S HOUSE OF CLONES. How very, very convenient...

The trouble with the cloned Philippa isn't merely that she comes expensive (Honest John asks remarkably little, but that lock of hair was £15,000). It's that she somehow knows too much about the 21st century and already has a boyfriend who isn't David. Was everything a setup by her alleged father, suspiciously resembling the one-eyed god Odin? And who are all these similar-looking chaps with a missing eye? Attack of the Clones!

David's rollercoaster adventures continue with police arrest for murder, escape after a one-eyed lawyer gives him (a brand-new ploy) a cake hidden in a file, and abduction for sinister experiments aboard what certainly seems to be a UFO. The only logical explanation, of course, is a race of highly evolved, space-travelling frogs.

Further story convolutions are largely indescribable. Key ingredients include frogspawn, dandruff and (the secret of interstellar travel) white sugar. Soon there's more than one Philippa in circulation. Froggy transformations abound. David makes astonishing discoveries about his true identity and enormous family. Libel lawyers advise us not to quote the Microsoft jokes.

Cheerful silliness in the characteristic Holt style. --David Langford

Review
Few would deny that Tom Holt is breathing down the neck of Terry Pratchett when it comes to bestselling comic fantasy. Holt may not possess the manic, surrealistic edge that distinguishes Pratchett's Discworld books, but he offers his own very individual brand of madly logical humour, and such books as Snow White and the Seven Samurai show a comic writer at full stretch. In Falling Sideways, Holt takes on the origins of civilisation. While man's ultimate ascendancy has stretched from the first homo sapiens descending from the trees to nations destroying each other, there is little doubt that humanity is the progenitor of every great civilisation. Wrong. Holt's hero believes he has discovered the real (and hideous) truth: that every great civilisation in history has, rather embarrassingly, been founded, run and then cunningly manipulated by a small gang of devious frogs. Each logical absurdity is piled upon the last with satisfying regularity.

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