Book description
A COMIC EPIC FOR ANYONE WHO LOVES RODDY DOYLE, P. G. WODEHOUSE,
BECKETT AND KAFKA, BUT WISHES THEIR BOOKS HAD MORE
EXPLOSIONS...
'The Death of the Author is on your
conscience!'
It was. 'Sorry,' I said.
Jude is a penniless
Irish orphan, fighting blizzards, bankers and the laws of physics as
he walks the length of England. He has not one, but two Quests: to
find his True Love -- last glimpsed in the hairy clutches of a monkey
-- and to uncover the Secret of his Origins.
Within hours of
arriving in London, Jude has floored the monkey, won the Turner Prize,
battled The Thing, and killed the Poet Laureate. Before the day is out
he will be seduced, shot at, kidnapped, and forced to discuss
literature with a crowd of Guinness-guzzling authors.
But can he
fulfill his destiny in the labyrinth of the city, with its ten million
temptations?
'What a day! And I never got my cup of
tea.'
'Sheer comic brilliance' The Times
'Julian Gough is a
wonderful writer' Sebastian Barry
'Julian Gough gives a new shine
to an antique mode, the Quixotic picaresque, as he relates the antic
adventures of a Tipperary orphan. It's clever, it's nuts, and there
are moments of comic greatness' Kevin Barry, Irish Times, Books of the
Year, 2007
'Clever and laugh-out-loud hilarious' Mail on
Sunday
'This is funny. It is also, possibly, quite serious.
Certainly, it endears' Irish Times
'Gough's novel is like the
picaresque bastard love-child of Flann O Brien and Matt Groening, and
yet is all Julian Gough. Possibly the finest comic novel to come out
of Ireland since At Swim Two Birds, it recounts the story of Jude, an
orphan, as he wanders through Ireland in a quest to find his true love
and uncover the secret behind his parentage . . . Gough makes it look
easy, with an instinctive sense of timing, and a razor sharp and
subversive intellect' Sunday Tribune, Books of the Year, 2007
Julian Gough was born in London, to immigrant Irish parents living in
a bedsit. When he was seven, the family returned to Nenagh, Co.
Tipperary, when he was educated in a Christian Brothers school so tough
that one of his teachers ran away. Julian gained a degree in English and
Philosophy in Galway, where - lacking a private income, but desirous of
becoming a writer - he signed on the dole for ten years. In that time,
he learned how to write fiction, and crafted the lyrics for four albums
by underground rock band Toasted Heretic. His first novel, Juno &
Juliet, was published in 2001. He has spent the subsequent ten years
writing the Jude trilogy. At the height of the Irish property bubble, in
2006, he was evicted, and spent a year living in friends' empty houses
in Dublin and France. (He now lives in Berlin.) The first volume of Jude
was published in 2007. He has since won the BBC National Short Story
Award, an American Pushcart Prize, and been shortlisted for the
Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He represented Ireland in Best
European Fiction 2010. His popular BBC radio play, The Great Hargeisa
Goat Bubble, has been adapted for the stage, and will be produced next
year.
