The Death of Eli Gold

Description

The new novel from David Baddiel, comedian, columnist and author of the critically-praised The Secret Purposes. In New York's Mt. Sinai hospital, the world's greatest living writer, Eli Gold, is dying. Witnessing his death are his precocious 8-year-old daughter by his present (fifth) wife, his anxiety-ridden 44-year-old son from his third marriage, and his 89-year-old first wife, watching on TV from a care home in London. And also, secretly, his fourth wife's fundamentalist Mormon brother, who has never got over his sister's death in a suicide pact with Eli, a suicide pact that Eli survived. The Death of Eli Gold is a comedy, a thriller, and a meditation on love, death, aging, sex, fame, and the idea - the dying idea - of The Great Man.

David Baddiel was born in 1964 in Troy, New York, but grew up and lives in London. He is a comedian, television writer, columnist and author of three previous novels, of which the most recent is The Secret Purposes.

'The Death of Eli Gold is, like it's hero, an impressive and energetic piece of work. Unlike Eli, however, it is tender, rather lovely...And, of course, richly comic. Those who care to read between the one-liners will hear a more serious voice emerge: a maturing writer who may, with his next novel, be ready to throw off his English reserve and dare to attempt a redefinition of the Great Novel himself. Let's hope that he is, because this, his grown-up, fluent and bitingly bright fourth book, is shockingly good.' Melissa Katsoulis, The Times 'Remarkable...This is by far his most entertaining and satisfying novel' Mark Sellek, Independent on Sunday 'An English as much as an American tale, a comedy as much as an elegy...Heartbreaking' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 'The Death of Eli Gold is brilliant, wise, compassionate, satirical, mature, and better than anything Martin Amis has done in decades...This richly textured novel is not to be missed' Roger Lewis, Sunday Express