The Book of Dave

Available from Grove for the first time, Will Self's much-celebrated novel, dubbed by Sam Lipsyte "his satiric masterpiece . . . gripping, funny, and pleasurably intricate"

About the Author :
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; and Phone. He lives in South London.

Review :
Praise for The Book of Dave: "Self achieves an elaborate vision of vicious superstition and hopeless struggle."-New Yorker "Self marries his verbal acrobatics to social critique, gamely taking on corporate culture, family law, London urban sprawl, religion, racial division and the received wisdom of women's magazines and the pub . . . You're left with the intoxication of Self's wordplay and the clarity of his visions."--Los Angeles Times "[A] phantasmagoria of savageries . . . Self has upped his ante from Monty Python to Jonathan Swift, and gone straight to brilliant hell."--Harper's "Self seamlessly toggles between the two time periods, giving equal depth to frustrated, sympathetic Dave and to the inhabitants of the post-apocalyptic future."--Entertainment Weekly "A compelling argument for the absurdity often inherent in religion and the dangers of elevating any human to a cult figure. But even more profoundly, it's a meditation on the unfairness, on the contingency, of life . . . Thoroughly bleak, and satisfying in the uncompromising completeness of its vision."--Boston Globe "[Self's] most bodacious, coruscating and savage attack yet on a consumption-addled society whose soul is made of breakable plastic. The novel is also an utterly enthralling and laser-sharp nightmare of our present and future . . . A perversely exhilarating read. The bleak present and hopeless future are illuminated by the furious lyricism of Self's style. He wields language with the blazing precision and confident brio of a Jedi knight slashing through darkness. It's a light in the tunnel."--Minneapolis Star Tribune "What's most memorable here is not the panoramic vistas of these two dispiriting worlds, but their characters' brief moments of kindness, resonant as heartbeats under the shifting debris."--Washington Post "Will Self's satire is thorough and multilayered, reaching far beyond a simple skewering of the arbitrary nature of the sacred. Alternating between the future Ham and Dave's London provides plenty of deferred comedy . . . while simultaneously drawing solemn attention to the weight of our own historical footprint."--Village Voice "[A] gleaming new puzzlebook . . . Self is endlessly talented, and in crossbreeding a fantasy novel with a scorching satire of contemporary mores, he's created a beautiful monster of the future that feeds on the neurotic present--and its parents."--Publishers Weekly "An extraordinarily brilliant and engaging donnéeacute;e . . . Not principally a funny book, but a tender and strange one. A society run according to the ideas of London taxi-drivers in more ordinary hands could only have been a satire; Self is a good enough novelist to go on asking questions of that situation, reaching into peculiarly painful crevices of the mind with steady hands."--Spectator "Will Self revels in unraveling his hapless cabbie with a brio characteristic of his typically ebullient prose. It complements his breadth as a writer that he can also render this grotesque figure as a tender victim of emasculated paternity."--Financial Times Praise for Phone: Shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize Seattle Pi Fiction to Watch for in 2018 "The British author Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the most fascinating of the tradition's torch bearers. Phone is the final volume in a trilogy that traces the arc of technology and consciousness across the