The Butt

Description

When Tom Brodzinski finally decides to give up smoking during a family holiday in a weird, unnamed land, a moment's inattention becomes his undoing. Flipping the butt of his last cigarette off the balcony of the holiday apartment, it lands on the head of the elderly Reggie Lincoln, and burns him. Despite Brodzinski's liberal attitudes and good intentions, the local authorities treat his action as an assault. Soon the full weight of the courts and tribal custom is brought to bear. What follows is a journey through a fantastically distorted world, a country that is part Australia, part Iraq and entirely the heart of distinctively modern darkness.

Promotion info

Will Self's last novel, The Book of Dave, sold 88,000 copies through Bookscan Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction One of the most original novelists of his generation whose fiction is becoming more accessible

Reviews

'The Butt is Self's most gripping and disturbing novel in years' - Harper's Bazaar 'With a flick of a cigarette Will Self performs literary acrobatics few other writers can even dream of' - Scotland on Sunday 'A writer at the height of his immeasurable powers' - Yorkshire Post 'Self writes here with an adroit impersonation of coarse exuberance that makes The Butt as readable as a blokeish airport novel ... Ingenious' - Sunday Telegraph