Shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award: a modern comic classic from ‘A British writer to be treasured’ (Independent on Sunday)
The news couldn't be worse for Tam, Richie and their new supervisor: Mr McCrindle's fence has gone slack.
The three of them are duly dispatched to the McCrindle farm, where they finish off the work, then go to England where, after rain-sodden days bashing in fence posts, they wolf down baked beans in their shared caravan and spend their evenings and cash in the local pub. But then they encounter the Hall Brothers – butchers, rival fencers and local heroes...
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
The team travels south to England, where they live out of a damp, cold caravan in the town of Upper Bowland. Here they soon find themselves at loggerheads with the sinister Hall brothers, whose business enterprises seem to combine fencing, butchering, sausage-making and the mysterious "school dinners". "We committed no end of good deeds!" cries John Hall. "Yet still we lost the school dinners! Always the authorities laying down some new requirement, one things after another! This time is seems we must provide more living space. Very well! If that's the way they want it, we'll go on building fences for ever if necessary! We'll build pens and compounds and enclosures! And we'll make sure we never lose them again!"
In between placing Kafkaesque obstacles in his narrator's path, Mills seeds his novel with small, darkly comic touches: Tam's father, whom we last see erecting a stockade round his house "to stop you from coming home any more"; the sound of Richie's Black Sabbath tapes "slowly being stretched in an under-powered cassette player"; the caravan's encroaching squalor; An Early Bath for Thompson, the book that Richie tries in vain to read when they run out of money for pubs. No doubt about it, this is a strange book that only grows stranger as it progresses; with any luck it augurs well for more brilliant, odd work from debut novelist Mills. --Mary Park
'A demented, deadpan comic wonder' Thomas Pynchon
'A heaving cauldron of black humour... I can guarantee that if you buy this book you'll never look at a stretch of high-tensile agricultural fencing in quite the same way ever again' Time Out
'Extremely unusual, finely crafted and funny' Observer
'Clever and funny and rewardingly strange ... in a manner which may be called Kafkaesque' Independent on Sunday
'Unpretentious, comic and intelligent' Daily Telegraph
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0006551149
Book Description Paperback. Condition: Brand New. 224 pages. 7.80x4.80x0.63 inches. In Stock. This item is printed on demand. Seller Inventory # 0006551149