Will Self - The Book of Dave

They were walking down Heath Street when Cal asked, 'Have you ever considered it — doing the Knowledge, I mean?' Carl didn't reply immediately — not out of surliness, only because it often took a while for messages from the outside world to make it over the high wall, to where he crouched, hidden inside his secret mummyself. Eventually he climbed up and over to the daddy side and replied, 'Nah, t'be honest I'm kind of interested in being a lawyer — there's gotta be more of a future in it.'

1 Dating is from the purported discovery of the Book of Dave.

"Self is endlessly talented."

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Will Self's satire is thorough and multi-layered, 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

"Fans of Self's previous edgy satires won't be disappointed with The Book of Dave, his latest riff on the strange complexities of the modern world. Balancing stories of pained intimacies between fathers and sons, it also brilliantly caricatures the fervor of literal-minded religious fundamentalizm…Blisteringly astute."

— Rocky Mountain News

"Remarkable…among his most ambitious and imaginative… The Book of Dave seems to be about the crippling nihilism of a world without transcendent meaning and the tensions and contradictions of the religious personality."

— Weekly Standard

"Like Martin Amis, with whom he's often compared, 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

"You will marvel at the ingenuity of this highly literate, superbly written satire of what societies deem sacred. Highly recommended."

— Library Journal (starred review)

"Will Self excels at what might best be described as the what if?' mode of storytelling. Over four story collections, four novellas, and four novels, Will Self has developed his own antic, satiric and often hilarious stable of what-if stories…Self's fifth novel, The Book of Dave, is his most elaborate…what-if yet. Self imagines what would happen if, 500 years from now, English society was shaped not by Judeo-Christian theology but by the scurrilous rantings of a hateful 21st-century London cabbie."

— New York Times

"Self's command of the English language is both unrivalled and astonishing… [He is] perhaps the best writer of his generation (his short stories are peerless)… The Book of Dave… is Self's most assured work…[It] is, in the end, a bittersweet parallel of a father (Dave) searching for his lost son and a son (Carl) seeking out his lost dad."

— Toronto Globe & Mail

"Not content with one language in which to strut his showy stuff, the fiendishly inventive British novelist Will Self creates an imaginary one and proceeds to riff like mad."

— Boston Globe

"This is as rousing an indictment of organized religion — and especially fundamentalism — as readers are likely to encounter in the post-9/11 canon."

— Booklist (starred review)