Earlier this year, Julian Gough won the National Short Story Prize for ‘The Orphan and the Mob’, a gem of comic writing with the ingenuous Jude as its narrator. That piece serves as the prelude to Jude: Level One, and its very first sentence – ‘If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the Mob would never have burnt down the Orphanage’ – neatly sums up just one of numerous disasters (and sometimes triumphs) Jude unwittingly causes throughout the novel.

Subscribe or Sign In to read the full article