About the Book
Bunny Munro sells beauty products and the dream of hope to the lonely housewives of the south coast. Set adrift by his wife's sudden death and struggling to keep a grip on reality, he does the only thing he can think of: with his young son in tow, he hits the road.
While Bunny plies his trade and his sexual charisma door-to-door, nine-year-old Bunny Junior sits patiently in the car exploring the world through the pages of his encyclopaedia.
As their bizarre and increasingly frenzied road trip shears into a final reckoning, Bunny finds that the revenants of his world - decrepit fathers, vengeful ghosts, jealous husbands and horned psycho-killers - have emerged from the shadows and are seeking to exact their toll.
A tender portrait of the relationship between a father and a son, The Death of Bunny Munro is a stylish, furious and hugely enjoyable read, bursting with the wit and mystery that fans will recognise as hallmarks of Cave's singular vision.
About the Author :
Nick Cave, perhaps best known as the lead singer and songwriter of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, is an artist whose output is prolific and ever-evolving. Over a creative career that spans more than 40 years, Cave has worked across a diverse number of disciplines; as a solo and collaborative musician, a score composer, a writer of books, film scripts and his weekly mailer, The Red Hand Files, and more recently as a ceramic artist. His debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published in 1989. His second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, was published in 2009 to critical acclaim. The Sick Bag Song, a cocktail of poetry, travel and memoir, was published in 2015; and Stranger than Kindness, an autobiographical journey in images and words, was a Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller when it was released in 2020. His 2022 book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, an extended conversation with Observer journalist, Seán O'Hagan, was a Sunday Times bestseller.
Nick Cave was born in Warracknabeal, Australia. He lives between London and Brighton with his wife, fashion designer Susie Cave.
@nickcaveofficial | nickcave.com
Review :
A modern-day parable, illuminated with raw lyricism, scraps of tenderness and dark phantasmagoria. Accessible, thrilling and gloriously impolite.
Put Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka and Benny Hill together in a Brighton seaside guesthouse and they might just come up with The Death of Bunny Munro. A compulsive read possessing all Nick Cave's trademark horror and humanity.
Like one of Martin Amis's early characters, Bunny is an antihero of epic proportions.
Cocksman, Salesman, Deadman; Bunny Munro might not be Everyman, but every man ought to read this book. And read it half in stitches, half in tears.
Cave makes you shudder and sob simultaneously...
Pulses with demented musical energy. The reader is drawn along in Bunny's terrible wake, with Cave's writing style and pitch-black humour giving him an unsettling magnetism.
The Death of Bunny Munro is not just a wonderful read, it's also a heartbreaking one. Cave writes novels like he does lyrics, with strokes of blood and sulphur and lightning. He strikes at the mind and heart and is able to bring his readers to their knees.
Horrifying but terrific.
In its own twisted way The Death of Bunny Munro is a plea for love in a world rancid with lust ... Bunny's bad boy charm makes it all too easy to go along for the ride
This sad, hilarious and filthy novel could do for men's base private thoughts what Sex and the City did for girl chat.
The perfect literary expression of Cave's later style . . . What truly elevates the novel is not Cave's thesis, but the smoothness of the prose and masterful combination of black comedy and sentiment
Told with verve, studded with scalding humour . . . What lingers are the linguistic fireworks.
You will blanch with horror, recoil with distress and then, most unexpectedly of all, feel some sort of twisted sympathy for his anarchistic antichrist of a hero.
Cave's previous novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was a gothic fever-dream composed of swamp gas and scripture, presided over by the spirit of Faulkner and O'Connor. This second book, though, is more original.
Unflagging in its imaginative energy and mordant humour . . . Cave makes you shudder and sob simultaneously.
In the sense of narrative animation, and also in the sense of cultural significance, the book is a vital one, and is to be welcomed and celebrated
Cave stands as one of the great writers on love of our era.
There has got to be something seriously wrong with you for liking this character as much as you're going to.
