A Spot Of Bother By Mark Haddon

The most keenly awaited paperback of the year - the brilliant new novel by the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

‘Haddon’s style is a reader’s bliss. He writes seamless prose. The words are melted into meaning… Haddon’s gift is to make us look at ourselves when we think we’re looking away, being entertained’ Tom Adair, The ScotsmanPublished by VINTAGE on 14 June 2007‘A painful, funny, humane, novel: beautifully written, addictively readable and so confident’ The Times

‘A crisp, light effortless read, a sympathetic and sometimes very funny social comedy that, for the most part, perfectly skewers its hapless protagonists and their hopeless pretensions … Like Nick Hornby… he can bring to everyday life a pleasing solidity and veracity, and he can also place a character with a single, deft phrase’ Sunday Times‘An antidote to cynicism…. Haddon floats insights –sculpted, delicate and precise as origami – on currents of offbeat wit… you don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the waywardness of the human spirit, you are salved by the compassion and humour of the tale. The delight is in the detail’ Sunday HeraldGeorge Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. 'The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.' Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased - as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials.

Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.

The way these damaged people fall apart - and come together - as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon's disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

Mark Haddon is an author, illustrator and screenwriter who has written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs. His bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was published simultaneously by Jonathan Cape and David Fickling in 2003. It won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award. His poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea was published by Picador in 2005. Mark Haddon lives in Oxford.A Spot Of Bother By Mark Haddon