Wilt In Nowhere: (Wilt Series 4) - Softcover

Sharpe, Tom

3.64

1,910 ratings by Goodreads

9780099481737: Wilt In Nowhere: (Wilt Series 4)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099481731 ISBN 13: 9780099481737

Publisher: Arrow, 2005

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When his endlessly capricious wife Eva receives plane tickets for the family to visit Auntie Joan and Uncle Wally in Atlanta, Wilt knows only one thing - that nothing could entice him to fly three thousand miles over the water, and especially not two rotund Americans with more money than sense. What better way to escape and find equilibrium then to embark on a walking tour? Just Wilt, the countryside, and an ill-judged bottle of whiskey...

Meanwhile, Eva finds her plans to inherit Joan and Wally's fortune slipping away faster than her sanity, thanks to a combination of sinister teenage quadruplets with foul mouths, and her unexpected role as lead suspect in a drug-trafficking plot.

Outrageous, darkly comic, and packed with calamity on top of calamity, Tom Sharpe's latest episode of Wilt's misadventures is a razor-sharp farce that will delight fans both old and new.

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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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