Wilt in Nowhere - Softcover

Sharpe, Tom

3.64

1,910 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0091799651 ISBN 13: 9780091799656

Publisher: Hutchinson, 2004

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In Tom Sharpe's fourth uproarious Wilt novel, the indefatigable Henry Wilt embarks on the voyage of a lifetime -- a cross-country trip through England, without map or compass, carrying little more than a backpack and the boots on his feet. A week later sees him drunk and unconscious in the back of an arsonist's pickup truck. His trip goes even further downhill from there until he revives in the hospital, unable to figure out how he could possibly stand accused of arson, assassination and robbery. Meanwhile, Eva has taken the quads to visit Uncle Wally and Aunt Joan in Tennessee. With the four girls leaving their customary trail of insanity and destruction wherever they go, not to mention a mob of embittered drug enforcement agents, Eva's journey has also spiralled out of control. Bitingly funny, Wilt in Nowhere pits Wilt against the intricacies of police persecution and the underbelly of Britain's medical facilities, brilliantly exposing the farcical realities of small-town England and America.

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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" (The Times)

"Tom Sharpe is back and he's on cracking form" (Daily Mail)

"One of the most widely enjoyed comic writers in Britain ... his position at the heart of British comedy is as assured as that of the seaside postcard" (Observer)

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