Jude: Level 2 — Julian Gough

A COMIC EPIC FOR ANYONE WHO LOVES RODDY DOYLE, P.G. WODEHOUSE, BECKETT AND KAFKA, BUT WISHES THEIR BOOKS HAD MORE EXPLOSIONS...'The Death of the Author is on your conscience!'It was. 'Sorry,' I said.Jude is a penniless Irish orphan, fighting blizzards, bankers and the laws of physics as he walks the length of England. He has not one, but two Quests: to find his True Love -- last glimpsed in the hairy clutches of a monkey -- and to uncover the Secret of his Origins.Within hours of arriving in London, Jude has floored the monkey, won the Turner Prize, battled The Thing, and killed the Poet Laureate. Before the day is out he will be seduced, shot at, kidnapped, and forced to discuss literature with a crowd of Guinness-guzzling authors.But can he fulfill his destiny in the labyrinth of the city, with its ten million temptations?'What a day! And I never got my cup of tea.''Sheer comic brilliance' The Times 'Julian Gough is a wonderful writer' Sebastian Barry'Julian Gough gives a new shine to an antique mode, the Quixotic picaresque, as he relates the antic adventures of a Tipperary orphan. It's clever, it's nuts, and there are moments of comic greatness' Kevin Barry, Irish Times, Books of the Year, 2007'Clever and laugh-out-loud hilarious' Mail on Sunday'This is funny. It is also, possibly, quite serious. Certainly, it endears' Irish Times'Gough's novel is like the picaresque bastard love-child of Flann O Brien and Matt Groening, and yet is all Julian Gough. Possibly the finest comic novel to come out of Ireland since At Swim Two Birds, it recounts the story of Jude, an orphan, as he wanders through Ireland in a quest to find his true love and uncover the secret behind his parentage . . . Gough makes it look easy, with an instinctive sense of timing, and a razor sharp and subversive intellect' Sunday Tribune, Books of the Year, 2007