Another unmissable comic outing from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Bee Sting

Shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award



This is the story of Charles Hythloday and the heroic squandering of a family inheritance. Featuring drinking, greyhound racing, vanishing furniture, more drinking, old movies, assorted Dublin lowlife, eviction and the perils of community theatre, Paul Murray’s first novel is a tour de force of comedic writing wrapped in an honest-to-goodness tale of a man – and a family – living in denial.

Review

"Paul Murray manages to fit a brilliant social novel in the small spaces of a farce, without ever losing his lightness of touch or his sense of humor. The result is something absolutely unique. Murray starts with Wodehouse (and does him proud), but ends somewhere entirely his own–somewhere very, very funny and surprisingly touching. I really love this book."
–Arthur Phillips, bestselling author of Prague

“A lyrical, satirical tour de force, a huge, hilarious elegy. A surreal and very funny festival of truths, fictions, luck, and love. How can this be a first novel? A triumph.”
–Ali Smith, Booker Prize finalist and author of Hotel World

“One of the most entertaining and laugh-out-loud Irish yarns of recent years.”
–Irish Independent

“The plot scuttles along with Wodehouse-like delirium. . . . Murray’s clearly having fun, but beneath the bouncy tone he manages to weave real depth into the characters’ relationships.”
–Time Out (London)

“A hilarious, rich and satisfying novel.”
–The Times Literary Supplement

“[A] comedy of the highest caliber.”
–The Sunday Tribune (Ireland)

About the Author

Paul Murray was born in Dublin in 1975 and is the author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies, The Mark and the Void and The Bee Sting. An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. The Mark and the Void won the Everyman Wodehouse Prize. The Bee Sting won the Nero Book of the Year Award and the An Post Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Writers’ Prize for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Paul Murray lives in Dublin.

Paperback, International Edition, April 12, 2011, 480 pages