The Sellout: WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016

Beatty, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1786070170 ISBN 13: 9781786070173

Publisher: Oneworld Publications, 2016

Born in the 'agrarian ghetto' of Dickens - on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles - the narrator of The Sellout is raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, and spends his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. Led to believe his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes, he is shocked to discover, when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, that there never was a memoir. All that's left is a bill for a drive-through funeral.Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from embarrassment. Enlisting the help of Dickens' most famous resident - Hominy Jenkins - he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school. What follows is a remarkable journey that challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement and the holy grail of racial equality - the black Chinese restaurant.

Review:

‘A no-holds-barred satire about the history and legacy of racism in America’.

(Guardian, Best Books of the Year)

‘A book of coruscating satire and the darkest humour whose bilious narrative voice leaves you at once enthralled and exhausted’.

(Observer, Best Books of 2016)

‘One of the few books of recent years that has made me choke with laughter’.

(Daily Mail, Best Books of 2016)

‘A provocative, razor-sharp satire’.

(Mail on Sunday, Best Books of 2016)

‘Wow, the Man-Bookers got it right! Nothing is harder to write or easier to read than a full-on comic-philosophic novel that makes you laugh and think, sometimes at the same time. Nathanael West and Joseph Heller are hooting from heaven for this one. If you haven’t already read Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, your life is more meagre for the omission’. 

(Simon Schama Financial Times, Best Books of 2016)

‘A deeply ironic, comically inventive and sometimes very sad novel’.

(Lorien Kite Financial Times, Best Books of 2016)

‘[An] outrageous scattergun satire’.

(Telegraph, Books of the Year)

‘A hilarious, anger-fuelled cadenza that feels as if it were written in one manic burst’. 

(Mark Haddon Observer, Best Books of 2016)

‘Bitterly funny and finely layered...[The Sellout] seems even more essential after the racially demarcated “whitelash” of Donald Trump’s victory.’

(Tom Gatti, New Statesman, Books of the Year 2016)

‘I was banned from reading in bed because I was laughing so much.’

(Olivia Williams, Man Booker Judge 2016)

From the Author:

PAUL BEATTY is the author of the novels Slumberland, Tuff, The White Boy Shuffle and The Sellout, which has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce, and is the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. He lives in New York City.