Editions

One Big Damn Puzzler

One Big Damn Puzzler

On a remote South Pacific island paradise, an elderly tribesman is translating Hamlet into local Pidgin English. Much to his annoyance, his struggles with the Bard are interrupted by the arrival of an unexpected visitor. William Hardt is a young American lawyer, he has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and he has come to help. And from that moment on, nothing will ever be the same. For what (and who) he finds there will challenge both his and our values and our ideas about love, life and even death.
Bursting with good things, from the islanders themselves - with their curious logic, strange notions about sex and addictive rendering of English - to moments of aching sadness as much as life-affirming farce, this exuberantly original novel confirms John Harding as one of contemporary fiction's most entertaining and observant chroniclers of the human condition.

Reviews

  • "Enormously enjoyable...Harding tackles this novel's huge, tragic subject with a blissfully skewed lightness of touch."

    DEBORAH MOGGACH

  • "Masterly...ambitious in scope and executed with wit and exuberance, John Harding has created a rich, complex and endearing fictitious world which holds important truths for our own."

    DAILY MAIL

  • "Instantly winning...it made me laugh. A lot...Gaugin-gaudy, and as rich and spicy as a good dish of stewed yam"

    DAILY TELEGRAPH

  • "Blackly comic...intensely literary...an allusive tour de force... thoroughly entertaining."

    THE TIMES

  • "A multi-layered comedy...laugh-out-loud funny, ambitious, carefully constructed, addictive, this novel is one big damn fine achievement."

    GLASGOW HERALD

More from this Author

About the Author

John Harding

John Harding was born in a small Fenland village in the Isle of Ely in 1951. After local village and grammar schools, he read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he once sat next to Martin Amis during a lecture. He worked first as a newspaper reporter, then as a writer and editor in magazines, before becoming a freelance writer. His first novel was the acclaimed and bestselling WHAT WE DID ON OUR HOLIDAY. He lives in Richmond upon Thames with his wife and two sons.

John Harding

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