Fold - Brossura

Campbell, Tom

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1408807602 ISBN 13: 9781408807606

Casa editrice: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011

Riassunto

Five friends. One year. All bets are off.

Reading, 2009. It may not be Vegas, but for Nick, Doug, Vijay, Alan and Simon, it's as good as they're going to get.

Each in their forties, and beset by anxieties, flaws and frustrations, they meet monthly in each other's houses for a 'friendly' game of poker, enabling Doug to show off his new-minted wealth, Simon to insist on serving only red wine and goats' cheese and Nick - swimming in a cocktail of envy, fear, bravado and disappointment - to make increasingly desperate attempts to bring an end to his interminable losing streak.

While Vijay meticulously records every win and loss on his spreadsheet, and Alan frets about his propensity to break into sweat and his inability to get his wife pregnant, Nick becomes obsessed with the idea of engineering Doug's downfall: Doug, who with his big house, his successful business and his appalling taste is both everything that Nick aspires to and resents. Convinced of the heroic nature of his task, he aims to triumph over Doug in poker, as well as in life, and in doing so he comes into troubling proximity to Sophia, Doug's clever and beautiful wife ...

Su questo libro

Recensione

You need know nothing about cards to relish the scabrous black comedy [...] in Tom Campbell's scintillating debut novel ... Campbell pulls off the difficult trick of putting the reader in the company of essentially unlikeable characters but keeping us thoroughly entertained. In doing so, he echoes the precise, unbridled nastiness of early 1980s Martin Amis. The pages of lean, measured prose ping with telling bons mots and, as the stakes are raised, the ruthless gamesmanship involving drugs and indecent exposure defies you not to laugh out loud even as you gasp in horror at the amorality (Metro)

All the men are wondering - with the funny yet bleak dialogue of other boys' novels (Hornbyesque with a touch of Nick Cave's Grinder Man album thrown in) - how on earth they ended up teaching or in IT or poor or married to a bitch, in Reading ... a hilarious expose of the insane levels of competition between blokes (Daily Mail)

Descrizione del libro

Bitingly funny, glitteringly dark and bursting with humanity, Fold is a tale of friendship and rivalry, of jokers and kings, and of learning that it's not the hand life deals you, but what you do with it, that counts

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1408807602
• ISBN 13: 9781408807606
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 224