We Are Pirates

Honest and funny, dark and painful, We Are Pirates reads like the result of a nightmarish mating experiment between Joseph Heller and Captain Jack Sparrow.? It’s the strangest, most brilliant offering yet from the mind behind Lemony Snicket * Neil Gaiman *
Beneath all the trappings of make-believe and fancy dress, there is a poignant, serious story about a girl’s need to find her true self, shackled to her desire to escape from the world – and the irreconcilable, sometimes bloody conflict between those two yearnings … Although We Are Pirates is as ragged and slapdash as its crew, its voyage is no less joyful or defiant * Daily Telegraph *
Daniel Handler turns whimsy into wisdom and the fantastic into the great. He is, of course, a genius * Lorrie Moore *
This, his fifth novel for adults, retains the whimsy, intrigue and high camp of his children’s fiction … Silly but poignant **** * Sunday Telegraph *
Shaped by a wild imagination … It’s funny and outrageous – a plea for the possibility of adventure, superbly imagined * The Times *
It’s been a long time since I read a book quite as crazy as We Are Pirates. It manages to be funny, weird, dark and moving all at once. It’s a wild and anarchic ride, as gleefully out-of-step with much literary fiction as a pirate galleon amid a fleet of sailing dinghies, and all the better for it. I loved it * Matt Haig, author of The Humans *
A tale that hovers somewhere between realism and fantasy. Full of sharp (and angry) observations about modern life, We Are Pirates is strange, dark and subversive * Financial Times *
Displaying typically impudent imagination, Handler choreographs this quixotic whimsy with a dexterous touch and flashes of wit … While the novel builds to a thrillingly mounted and surprisingly emotive climax, the absence of sympathetic characters to root for also holes it below the waterline and leaves it and its cargo of rich prose stranded some way from port * Sunday Times *
A madcap, disturbingly funny novel that teeters on the edge of the surreal, even as it asks us to examine who and what we value * Observer *
Gloriously cut loose from much in the current book market, We Are Pirates is a pirate adventure for grown-ups set in modern-day San Francisco … A swashbuckling, wonderfully eccentric message in a bottle for those seeking a social order beyond the realm of traditional authority … Hilarious and haunting * Independent on Sunday *