Andrew Barrow – författare

‘My favourite novel and one I wish I’d written.’ ALAN BENNETT Winner of the McKitterick Prize for best first novel by an author aged over 40, and the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature. Everyone craves retirement from the Civil Service, don’t they? That time for an ageing patriarch to enjoy the fruits of a well-earned pension and the respect of his family; maybe even to indulge in a love of music halls and metropolitan life. If only people would listen and do as they were told…His fourth son William, the long-suffering narrator, is the constant butt of his father’s jokes and victim of his brothers’ indifference. But as death, divorce and other darker dramas follow, father and son slowly establish a strange harmony.

Are all aspiring stand-up comics as tragic as Baby Reindeer? If William is anything to go by, the answer is possibly ‘yes’. Nostalgic, razor-sharp and deliciously peculiar, this is a weird but wonderful comedy of manners by the award-winning author of The Tap Dancer. William is a lonely young man on the loose in the late 1960s. A disastrous appearance as a stand-up comic in a pub called The Man In the Moon is only the start of his adventures, in which he consorts with theatrical types, frenzied advertising men and accident-prone lodgers.William’s exploits lead him eventually to the consulting rooms of a Harley Street psychiatrist, where his delusions that he is a comic genius can finally be laid bare.Andrew Barrow’s second – and so far last – novel, first published in 1996, is a hilariously bittersweet comedy that follows in the footsteps of last year’s sensational reissue of The Tap Dancer, which drew praise from Alan Bennett (‘my favourite novel’), Craig Brown (‘sublime comedy’) and India Knight (‘hilariously funny’).