‘Nifty, often snort-inducingly funny satire’ – The Times
Mel Winterbourne’s modest map-making charity, the Orange Peel Foundation, has achieved all its aims and she’s ready to shut it down. But glamorous tech billionaire Joey Talavera has other ideas. He hijacks the foundation for his own purpose: to convince the world that the earth is flat.
Using the dark arts of social media at his new master’s behest, Mel’s ruthless young successor, Shane Foxley, turns science on its head. He persuades gullible online zealots that old-style ‘globularism’ is hateful. Teachers and airline pilots face ruin if they reject the new ‘True Earth’ orthodoxy.
Can Mel and her fellow heretics – vilified as ‘True-Earth Rejecting Globularists’ (Tergs) – thwart Orange Peel before insanity takes over? Might the solution to the problem lie in the 15th century?
Using his trademark mix of history and satire to poke fun at modern foibles, Simon Edge is at his razor-sharp best in a caper that may be more relevant than you think.
About the Author :
Simon Edge was born in Chester and read philosophy at Cambridge University.
He was editor of the pioneering London paper Capital Gay before becoming a gossip columnist on the Evening Standard and then a feature writer and critic on the Daily Express. He has an MA in Creative Writing from City University, London, where he also taught literary criticism.
He is the author of six novels, all published by Lightning: The Hopkins Conundrum, The Hurtle of Hell, A Right Royal Face-Off, Anyone for Edmund?, The End of the World is Flat and In the Beginning. He has been described as ‘Britain’s leading exponent of Horatian satire’.
He lives in Suffolk.
Review :
‘Simon Edge – a voice of sanity in the Twitter hellscape – wears his anger remarkably lightly as he skewers the shocking state of the trans rights row with some nifty, often snort-inducingly funny satire’
‘I hugely recommend Simon Edge’s magnificent pair of novels, The End of the World is Flat and In the Beginning. Coruscating satires on currently trendy anti-science lunacy, and the spiteful viciousness of its juvenile zealots and their cowardly adult enablers’
‘A satire that skewers the insanity of gender-identity ideology with the wit and brilliance of a modern-day Swift’
‘In between punching the air and shouting “yes!”, I laughed so hard I nearly fell in my cauldron. A masterpiece’
‘A bracingly sharp satire on the sleep of reason and the tyranny of twaddle. Simon Edge reveals how extraordinary delusions have the power to captivate us – until, one by one, we start coming to our senses’
‘This sparkling little comic novel is more than playful: it’s a satire of Swiftian ferocity, a thinly veiled parody of a prevailing madness of the hour’
‘Inspired… Edge has glorious, madcap fun…doing what Aristophanes thought poets should do in circumstances like these: save the city from itself. He holds social foibles and cod science up to ridicule with grace, wit and charm’
‘This witty author mixes history with a hilarious spoof of identity politics, virtue signalling, cancel culture and Twitter pile-ons’
‘A highly-entertaining satire about ideology, social media manipulation, and lobbying fiefdoms that have overstayed their welcome. This is Animal Farm for the era of gender lunacy, with jokes - and, right now, we all need a laugh’
‘Without mercy, this merry romp punctures the idiocy that would turn language and good sense upside down and try to divide us all into either true believers or bigots. It is a frightening reminder of what happens when we reject the power of dialogue’
‘Well-crafted, humane and engaging. For the committed gender critical crowd, in-jokes punctuate every page. But the work is more than a clever jab at trans ideology; it stands alone both as a modern morality tale charting one man’s descent into lies, and a warning about the vulnerability of the liberal values upon which modern society rests’
‘This very, very interesting book about the flat-earthers of the world’
‘Turns out I’ve been proven wrong: the world is not beyond satire. I know this thanks to Simon Edge and his very funny book’
‘A clever satire on the folly that ensues when a once-respected charity abandons principle and reason’
‘What makes the work fiction, and succeed as fiction, is the deft way Edge neatly avoids the thing he is really writing about’
‘In a refreshingly pointed reflection on the zeitgeist – a light-hearted lampoon, underpinned with wit and intelligence – Edge crafts an entirely conceivable plot, a parody that is awkwardly close to reality’
