Legoland
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Pan Macmillan
Published:23rd Mar '17
Should be back in stock very soon
A stunning new collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize-shortlisted author.
A stunning new collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize shortlisted author.
Many of Legoland's stories begin with the seemingly every day, only for a turn of events to land them in an unsettling place where life's normal rules no longer apply. Whether he's writing about a child’s birthday party or the invasion of an unnamed country each story is full of Woodward's blacker-than-black humour, fearless surrealism, and poetic phrasing. Included here is his brilliant story 'The Family Whistle', shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.
Legoland celebrates Woodward's trademark gift for wit and surprise: his lithe prose carrying us from comedy to tragedy and back again within a single tale. It confirms him as one of the most gifted and original writers of our time.
‘Gerard Woodward falls squarely between the comic lunacy of American short-form virtuoso George Saunders and the everyday rhapsodies of Raymond Carver’ Time Out
A comic sensibility closer to Alan Bennett or Tom Sharpe. Woodward's rueful amusement isn't frivolity, it's a world view * Financial Times *
Gerard Woodward falls squarely between the comic lunacy of American short-form virtuoso George Saunders and the everyday rhapsodies of Raymond Carver * Time Out *
Woodward is a skilful writer, with a fertile imagination * Guardian *
At his best, Gerard Woodward is one of our finest writers . . . he writes with subtlety and skill * Daily Telegraph *
I thought Legoland was incredible. The stories are SO good at capturing the weird nuances of apparently straightforward, everyday interactions. It's not an exaggeration to say that reading them has made me look at the world more carefully. -- Rebbeca Wait, author of THE FOLLOWERS
There are echoes of Milan Kundera and Roald Dahl in these dark and gleeful explorations of the surreal . . . Woodward's stories astonish: they seem to offer a predictable direction, then swerve elsewhere. And just like the toy that lends the title story's playground its name, these narratives are meticulously designed, building into dazzling and surprising structures...the stories range in genre from realism to pseudo-fairytale and in geography from postwar Germany to Colorado...remarkable...a gifted writer * Guardian *
ISBN: 9781447288695
Dimensions: 197mm x 130mm x 20mm
Weight: 233g
320 pages