Man at the Helm - Hardcover

Stibbe, Nina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241003156 ISBN 13: 9780241003152

Publisher: Viking, 2014

Synopsis

* * * NOMINATED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR * * *

Man at the Helm, the debut novel from Nina Stibbe - the much-loved author of Love, Nina - is a wildly comic, brilliantly sharp-eyed novel about the horrors of being an attractive divorcée in an English village in the 1970s, and a family's fall from grace . . .

My sister and I and our little brother were born (in that order) into a very good situation and apart from the odd new thing life was humdrum and comfortable until an evening in 1970 when my mother listened in to my father's phone call and ended up blowing her nose on a tea towel - a thing she'd only have done in an absolute emergency.

Not long after her parents' separation, heralded by an awkward scene involving a wet Daily Telegraph and a pan of cold eggs, nine-year-old Lizzie Vogel, her sister and little brother and their now divorcée mother are packed off to a small, slightly hostile village in the English countryside. Their mother is all alone, only thirty-one years of age, with three young children and a Labrador. It is no wonder, when you put it like that, that she becomes a menace and a drunk. And a playwright.

Worried about the bad playwriting - though more about becoming wards of court and being sent to the infamous Crescent Home for Children - Lizzie and her sister decide to contact, by letter, suitable men in the area. In order to stave off the local social worker they urgently need to find a new Man at the Helm.

'All hail a book that's funny!' Barbara Trapido

'[A] joyous read, full of wit and charm . . . I am already longing for Nina Stibbe's next book' Observer

'Nine-year-old Lizzie (our narrator) is the perfect conduit for her creator, just the right mixture of childhood innocence and incredulity for the necessary deadpan delivery of Stibbe's particular brand of comedy. Read it and be charmed' Independent

'A beguilingly comic blend of naivety and precociousness' Sunday Times

About this title

Review:

All hail a book that's funny! (Barbara Trapido)

I can't remember a book that made me laugh more . . . At times [it] reminded me of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. Man at the Helm is a winner - It even trumps Love, Nina (Observer)

[A] joyous read, full of wit and charm . . . I am already longing for Nina Stibbe's next book (Express)

A wicked anatomising of a dysfunctional family . . . Buoyantly comic: farcical yet tender; rude with a forgiving sweetness (Spectator)

Nine-year-old Lizzie (our narrator) is the perfect conduit for her creator, just the right mixture of childhood innocence and incredulity for the necessary deadpan delivery of Stibbe's particular brand of comedy. Read it and be charmed (Independent)

Fantastic. Comical, moving and brilliantly evocative of British childhood (Glamour)

A beguilingly comic blend of naivety and precociousness (Sunday Times)

Within a few pages I was completely caught up in the lives of Lizzie and her family . . . I couldn't have loved it more (Lisa Jewell)

This book is very, very funny. Stibbe has a fine eye for absurdity, and her writing has an unforced charm. [And] there is real darkness here, which makes the humour shimmer all the more (Independent on Sunday)

Convincingly childlike but also confidently witty . . . Stibbe's feat is to remain unsentimentally barbed while subtly and triumphantly demonstrating the value of the kind of understated love found within the strangest and least obviously functional families (Daily Telegraph)

From the Back Cover:

There was Mrs Lunt, who, whatever our mother called her, was always helpfully around and though definitely not in the nanny role (for she hated children and said they gave her the horrors) was a comforting presence and made wonderful little jam tarts, with different-coloured jams, which we called pot-dots. 'There's nothing quite like a jam tart to cheer a person,' she used to say, and although that was the only nice thing she ever said, it was nice and she said it often.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0241003156
• ISBN 13: 9780241003152
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320