Shark - Softcover

Self, Will

3.59

373 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067091858X ISBN 13: 9780670918584

Publisher: Viking, 2014

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Shark by Will Self - a thrilling new novel based on incredible real events, from the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella

Shark turns upon an actual incident in the Second World War when the ship which had delivered the fissile material to the south Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima was subsequently sunk by a Japanese submarine with the loss of 900 men, including 200 killed in the largest shark attack ever recorded.

When Creep, an American resident in the 1970s at the therapeutic community in north London supervised by psychiatrist Zack Busner, starts to tell rambling stories of thrashing about in the water while under attack from sharks, Busner has to decide whether they are schizoid delusions or reflect some sort of reality. And things get complicated when Creep's father flies in to remove his son from what he regards as a perverse commune.

Shark is a must-read for anyone who enjoyed The Book of Dave and Umbrella, and will appeal to readers of Irvine Welsh's Skagboys, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Huruki Murakami's IQ84.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012. He lives in South London.

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Review:

An exciting, mesmerizing, wonderfully disturbing book. Go with it and it will suck you under (Daily Telegraph)

Breathtaking and dazzling. An exhilarating tour-de-force ... immersing the reader in a trippy Odyssey (Daily Mail)

Intellectually dazzling and emotionally frazzling. Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation (Guardian)

Will challenge and disturb, exasperate and entertain (Independent)

Highly enjoyable, vividly, even profoundly imagined. Self is creating something rather grand (Sunday Times)

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Umbrella

'Miraculously captivating' Mark Lawson, Guardian
'A wonderful piece of sustained writing and passion' A.L. Kennedy, Scotsman
'Will Self finds his authentic voice as a writer and reclaims the high modernist mode as a natural and highly emotional form of narration. It's exhilarating' Jonathan Coe, Metro
'A work of unparalleled audacity ... fascinating and compulsive' John Boyne, Irish Times
'Daring, exuberant and richly dense... Will Self has carried the Modernist challenge into the twenty-first century, and worked a wonder' John Banville
'Unstoppably entertaining' The Times Books of the Year
'An exhilarating, addictive ride ... by the end you are filled with elation at the author's exuberant ambition and the swaggering way he carries it all off' Daily Mail Books of the Year
'His deepest and most rewarding novel to date' Guardian Books of the Year

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