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ADULT Boxy an Star Jim Giraffe Tom Boler CHILDREN Mouse Noses Sensible Hare Penguin Pioneer |
Manual {Faber & Faber 2008 UK paperback} My fourth adult novel. I am currently working on a follow-up, New Love, to be published by Faber in 2009. “Daren King is again at his best in this uncomfortably funny drama of clashing social classes, age groups and levels of sanity in east London. Manual soon steps out of its fetish-industry beginnings and becomes something much darker. A stuffed owl has never sounded so sinister.” Shortlist “The themes of Manual are darkly adult but King’s characters possess a sweetness and kindness that means they transcend their sordid environments and retain, against the odds, a sense of innocence.” London Metro “This tale of obsession is extremely weird, but strangely compelling.” Big Issue “Like all of King’s work, Manual is about the blurred line between fantasy and reality, the internal and external forces at work on people, and it creates tension by pitching naïve protagonists into dangerous surroundings.” The List My editor Lee Brackstone describes the novel using these clever words: “This is a book that stands shoulder to shoulder with B S Johnson, and as a novel of classic alienation I can’t think of a contemporary equivalent. It seems to me to be a book about how people fail to connect in a material world; how the more we have the less we know and the less we feel. It’s a kind of tragic requiem for the consumer culture, and its subversion of the culture of need and greed (sex, technology, invisible financial assets etc) which we all inhabit.” |
B&W photo by Rankin
