One Big Damn Puzzler

IS BE OR IS BE NOT, IS BE ONE BIG DAMN PUZZLEROn a remote South Pacific island paradise the struggles of an elderly tribesman to translate Shakespeare's Hamlet into the local pidgin English are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a young American lawyer with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. From that moment on, nothing will ever be the same . . .What follows is an ambitious and wonderfully original novel, inviting us into a sublimely imagined world teeming with life, ideas and full of wonders - the islanders with their strange notions about sex, their madly logical rituals and their tortured but addictive version of the English language, a curiously large number of people with artificial legs, and the dwarf pigs they hunt (when they can be bothered). It's a place where magic is everywhere, where you can buy a potion to make someone fall in love with you (all it costs is a few yams) and visit the kassa house and discover that the dead may not be so dead after all. It's a world so different it questions our own values and ideas about love, life and even death.Life-affirming, achingly funny and profoundly moving, One Big Damn Puzzler confirms John Harding as one of contemporary fiction's most entertaining and observant chroniclers of the human condition.

John Harding was born in the Isle of Ely in 1951. After local village and grammar schools, he read English at Oxford. He worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer and editor before becoming a freelance writer. His first novel, the bestselling What We Did On Our Holiday was shortlisted for the WHSmith New Talent Award. His second was the much-acclaimed While the Sun Shines. He lives in Richmond upon Thames with his wife and two sons.