A Box of Matches

'Nicholson Baker is our foremost authority on life's unexamined routines, our laureate of ritual' Scotland on Sunday

As Kipling was to the secrets of the jungle, so is Baker to modern domesticity, equally ready with fascinating observation

There is a good deal more everyday wonder here than in a hundred original miscellanies

This might be Baker's best yet - you're in for a treat

Like the small, agreeable sensations it so deftly evokes, this modestly scaled story is a pleasure that can add cheer to an entire day

Born in 1957 Nicholson Baker is the author of several acclaimed novels; A Box of Matches, Vox and The Fermata as well as essays, including the campaigning Double Fold for which the New York Times called him 'the Erin Brokovich of the library world'.

A man gets up earlier and earlier each day, dresses in the dark, makes his coffee and lights the fire with a box of matches. Then he rummages through the thoughts that crowd his head and preoccupy him. Here is mid-life domesticated man, whose thoughts veer brilliantly from love and marriage, to firelighters and suicide, in the twinkling of an eye. 
 
This is Baker at his best, humorous and observant, revealing the underlying truths about the ephemerality of life, the joy of small things, the darkness just the other side of everyday life - all human life in a box of matches.

The Fermata

'The funniest book about sex ever written' Literary Review

Lots of nakedness, quite a few surprises. His novels have the brazen, daring timidity of love letters you know you'll never post

The book is bursting with sex and beauty, wound together profoundly and pornographically. It is bountifully Rabelasisan and intensely refined. I have never read anything quite like it. Misogynists will definitely not like The Fermata; there is not one iota of violence towards or contempt for women in this book. Wildly exhilarating and confirming. The Fermata should be celebrated

Witty, dry and thought-provoking, a great addition to Baker's unique observatory of contemporary life

This is the story of Arno Strine, a modest temporary typist, who has perfected the knack of stopping time in its tracks and taking women's clothes off. He is hard at work on his autobiography, The Fermata, which proves in the telling to be a very provocative, very funny and altogether morally confused piece of work. 
 
Hilarious and totally original, Nicholson Baker's new novel is a triumphant comedy about sexual fantasy and fantastic sexuality.

Nicholson Baker

Two men - Jay and Ben - sit in a Washington hotel room. Jay has called his old friend Ben there - to tell him why and how he wants to kill the President. Jay is a bit of a loser (he's lost his girlfriend, his job, his car), generally easy-going, but now he's on edge and he's angry - and he's acquired some radio-controlled flying saws, and is working on a boulder with a depleted uranium centre- but he also has a gun and bullets. Ben is the voice of liberal reason, with a job and a family. Jay switches on a tape machine, and the two men argue. Well, Ben tries feebly to reason or cajole, while Jay rants and rages about everything from the horror of what happened at that southern Iraq checkpoint where US forces opened fire on a Shiite family in a Land Rover, killing most of them, and decapitating two young girls; to the iniquities of the present administration, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al., and abortion (if they're against abortion, how come they can kill women and children?), not to mention the napalm-like substance ('improved fire jelly') used in bombs in Iraq. Their dialogue veers from chilling and serious to wacky and crazed (Bush, says Jay, is 'one dead armadillo'). Checkpoint is a novel about a man pushed to the extremes, by a writer who is clearly angry. Like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, it takes the temperature of America just below the surface and finds it at boiling point.

Nicholson Baker

Books by Nicholson Baker

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