This is my first bingo square attempt, for having been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. And boy oh boy am I not surprised this didn’t get it. I liked Then We Came To The End well enough; The Unnamed slightly less so. But MAN did I not care for this book. The plot revolves around our dentist protagonist and his attempt to track down the identity thief posting cultish religious (or anti-religious? The book insists it’s sort of both but reading this thing through […]
Religion, Identity, and Flossing
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a story of contradictions, which perhaps explains why I’ve been having trouble getting started on this review. I liked this novel, but I’m sort of at a loss to explain what I liked about it. Maybe it’s the darkly comic tone of the novel, or the interplay of characters. But mostly I think it’s because it raises a bunch of philosophical questions that it doesn’t really ever answer, and I’m a sucker for that. (Note, if that […]
I thrill when I drill a bicuspid….
So here’s the thing. I had been gagging to read Ferris’s debut novel, Then We Came To The End, since it was published to near universal acclaim a few years ago. I finally got round to starting it at the end of March this year and hated it so much that I had to give up after 100 pages as I just couldn’t face reading another word. I hated all the characters and their tiresome situations. Having now read his latest, it affirms my suspicion about why […]

