Overtaken - Hardcover

Sayle, Alexei

3.65

314 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340767685 ISBN 13: 9780340767689

Publisher: Sceptre, 2003

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Kelvin is a 33-year-old property developer living in a small Lancashire town.
He has five close friends, all in well paid jobs. Having bought their lovely houses cheaply in the early 1990s, they are free to spend money on their own pleasures - particularly clothes, meals and cars. Most of all, their life revolves around going to see things - art exhibitions, comedians, live music, plays...
When we first meet the six friends they are on their way to see a new kind of circus. Once there Kelvin does something unforgivable to a clown, has a strange snack and meets the most beautiful girl he has ever seen.
It's the beginning of the end of the good life.

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About the Author:

Alexei Sayle is a comedian, actor, presenter and writer. His television work as a writer and performer includes The Young Ones, Alexei Sayle's Stuff, and The All New Alexei Sayle Show. He has written regularly for the Observer, Indepedent, Time Out, Car Magazine and Esquire and he has appeared in numerous films, from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Gorky Park and Swing

Review:

'An excellent collection of dark, funny and bizarre short stories... brutally, cynically and honestly written... all in all a lot better than anything David Baddiel could ever manage.' - Loaded - '14 bleak funny pitiless tales... This is life looked at through the wrong end of a telescope, the vision of Nathaniel West in Miss Lonelyhearts, and to my mind just as good... Inside every fat git there's a poet trying to get out. Well, he's out.' - Observer - 'Sayle is a funny man, and these tales of pensioners-turned-hitmen, mysterious white Fiat Unos, and inveterate hypochondriacs defy you not to smile at the incremental absurdity of ordinary life.' - The Sunday Times - 'A cracking read.. dense with smart ideas, sour observations and loony rants' - Independent on Sunday - 'Barcelona Plates will put a smile on your face and a chill down your spine' - Time Out - 'Alexei Sayle's manner on the page is the same as it is on screen and stage: arch, dessicated and menacing... 'The Last Woman Killed in the War' is a thrilling and sensitive meditation on history, race and identity; confirming Sayle as a brilliant chronicler of big stories set in small worlds.' - The Times

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