April 14th, 2011

We’ll be reviewing each title on the Bollinger sponsored Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction shortlist between now and the Hay festival. In the meantime, and to give you an idea of what’s on offer in our ‘Wooster’s Girl Name’ Competition, here are a brief synopses of each title.

Serious Menby Manu Joseph(John Murray)

Shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize in 2010, Joseph’s debut novel is a satirical tale of science, love and hope in modern India centring on Ayyan Mani, lowly assistant to brilliant yet insufferable astronomer, Arvind Acharya, who is obsessed with his theory about microscopic aliens falling to earth.

Comfort and Joy by India Knight (Penguin, Fig Tree)

From the author of My Life on a Plate and Don’t You Want Me, Comfort and Joy tells the ‘wickedly funny [and] painfully honest’ story of Carla Dunphy’s attempts to realise her lifelong ambition to make Christmas perfect.

The Coincidence Engine by Sam Leith (Bloomsbury)

Described by as ‘Philip K. Dick meets Evelyn Waugh in a fast-paced satire’ and ‘a comic, paranoid romp across America’, this first novel was tipped for success as one of the Waterstone’s 11 debuts to watch.

The News Where You Are by Catherine O’Flynn (Penguin)

Set in the author’s hometown of Birmingham, this second novel from Catherine O’Flynn follows Frank Allcroft, a regional TV news presenter, who has just been declared ‘the unfunniest man on earth’, as he investigates a mysterious hit and run that killed his (actually quite funny) predecessor. O’Flynn’s first novel, What Was Lost, won the 2007 Costa First Novel Award

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (Granta)

Described by David Mitchell as ‘an intoxicating brew of keen-edged satire, social prophecy, linguistic exuberance and emotional wallop’, this dystopian third novel from Shteyngart explores the value being human in a near-future America on the brink of collapse.