Comfort and Joy - Softcover

Knight, India

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141010959 ISBN 13: 9780141010953

Publisher: Penguin, 2011

Synopsis

It's December 23rd and Clara Dunphy is running around Oxford Street like a blue-arsed fly trying to buy presents. She wants to make Christmas perfect: it's a lifelong ambition. And a challenging one at the best of times, even without taking her sixteen guests - sorry, "loved ones" - and their varying degrees of social dysfunction into account. Meanwhile, something weird has happened to her marriage, and the ho, ho, ho is thin on the ground.Why does Christmas have such an emotional hold over us? Why does family stuff hit the peak of its madness on December the 25th? And is it okay to want more than you have, when what you have seems so enviable from the outside? A blackly funny, tender dissection of the meaning of love - family love, sibling love, children love - Comfort and Joy will make you laugh and cry.

About this title

Review:

Breathless, ­colourful, hilarious and honest; the dialogue is sitcom-snappy and the opening scenes in Oxford Street positively Joycean (Wendy Holden Daily Mail)

So kindly and funny and affectionate that you could probably warm your hands on it. Miraculously, this is a feel-good story that manages not to be saccharine. There are a great many good jokes here . . . but concealed amid the fun, like silver coins in a Christmas pudding, is a serious theme. This is a book you could safely give to practically anyone. Snap up plenty of copies to hand around under the tree (Spectator)

I loved Comfort and Joy, a hilarious, bawdy yet touching portrait of Christmas over three years (Jilly Cooper Guardian Books of the Year)

Fabulous. Laugh-out-loud funny, moving and as cuddly as Santa Claus, this is perfect for snuggling up with over the Christmas holidays (Cosmopolitan)

Touching...it will make you laugh, maybe make you cry and keep you reading past bedtime (Lauren Laverne Grazia)

A wickedly funny, painfully honest look at families, festivities and romantic love (Marie Claire)

Tender, tough, schmaltzy, witty and heart-warming all at once. Knight has a great comic touch - there are some wonderfully rude bits and a fantastic rant about the ridiculous expectations piled on 21st-century women to be perfect - and writes with a deceptive lightness. At the heart of this funny, affectionate novel is an acknowledgement that families, like love, come in odd shapes and sizes, and that both matter more than anything (Metro)

Witty enough to make you laugh out loud, but there are moments of real emotion that keep the book from being too light (Psychologies)

A superb ear for dialogue...wonderfully comic (Evening Standard)

Riotously high in laughs and glamour. I defy a festive grump not to be cheered by it (Independent Books of the Year)

About the Author:

India Knight is the author of two previous novels: My Life on a Plate and Don't You Want Me. Her non-fiction books include The Shops, the bestselling diet book Neris and India's Idiot-Proof Diet, the accompanying bestselling cookbook Neris and India's Idiot-Proof Diet Cookbook and The Thrift Book. India is a columnist for the Sunday Times and lives in London with her three children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0141010959
• ISBN 13: 9780141010953
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288