Gill Hornby

The Bawdy Bunch

A Spot of Bother

By

Jonathan Cape 400pp £17.99 order from our bookshop

Mark Haddon’s first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, was, you remember, a publisher’s dream. Not only did it win pretty much every award going, it also pulled off that remarkable – and highly lucrative – feat of straddling two markets. A charming insight into the mind of a fifteen-year-old with Asperger’s Syndrome, it was a huge hit with both adults and children alike. So the first question to be asked about his second novel is: Can he do it again? One has to read less than a third of A Spot of Bother to answer: He hasn’t even tried.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    • In this month's 'Silenced Voices', looks at the case of Azimjon Askarov, the journalist and human rights… ,
    Follow Us