Utterly Monkey - Softcover

Laird, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007346727 ISBN 13: 9780007346721

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2010

Synopsis

A very funny, energetic, wonderfully engaging novel about where we’re from and where we’d like to get to…

Danny Williams is talented, upwardly mobile and has left his Northern Irish small town roots well behind him. In his mid-twenties he lives in a stylish London flat and has a job in a top London law firm. However, one innocuous Wednesday night his old mucker from home, Geordie Wilson, arrives at the door. On the run from a loyalist militia, whose operational funds he has taken, he manages to bring everything that Danny has been fleeing from right to his smart London doorstep.

Taking place over an intense and gripping five-day period–set in both London and the fictional Irish town of Ballyglass–Nick Laird has written an hilarious, touching and ultimately redemptive novel about friendship.

About this title

About the Author

Nick Laird was born in 1975 in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, and until recently worked as a lawyer in London. His poems, essays and reviews have been published in various anthologies and journals including the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. Laird's first poetry collection, 'To a Fault', is published by Faber and Faber.

From Publishers Weekly

Laird—poet, former lawyer and husband of Zadie Smith—debuts, lad-lit style, with this sometimes entertaining story of childhood friends whose paths diverged radically and then reconverged. Danny Williams is a well-paid (if deeply unenthusiastic) lawyer at a prestigious London firm; Geordie Wilson, his boyhood chum from Northern Ireland, is "officially an unemployed labourer" who's just showed up on Danny's doorstep desperate for a place to stay. Geordie's in trouble with the Ulster Unionists back home, primarily because he has a sack full of their cash; Danny's been told he needs to go back to Northern Ireland to deal with a corporate takeover. Geordie joins forces with Danny, more out of idle curiosity than a sense of urgency (though the Unionists are planning something nasty). Laird's writing is clear and amusing, and both his protagonists are likable. But their aimlessness impedes the building of any narrative momentum, and the book's climactic scene is as rushed as it is contrived. The novel is well intentioned, clever and occasionally quirky—but the whole feels like less than the sum of its parts. (Jan.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007346727
• ISBN 13: 9780007346721
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352