Legoland

Description

A stunning new collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize shortlisted author. Many of Legoland's stories begin with the seemingly every day, only for a turn of events to land them in an unsettling place where life's normal rules no longer apply. Whether he's writing about a child's birthday party or the invasion of an unnamed country each story is full of Woodward's blacker-than-black humour, fearless surrealism, and poetic phrasing. Included here is his brilliant story 'The Family Whistle', shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Legoland celebrates Woodward's trademark gift for wit and surprise: his lithe prose carrying us from comedy to tragedy and back again within a single tale. It confirms him as one of the most gifted and original writers of our time. 'Gerard Woodward falls squarely between the comic lunacy of American short-form virtuoso George Saunders and the everyday rhapsodies of Raymond Carver' Time Out

Gerard Woodward is the author of a number of novels including Nourishment, and an acclaimed trilogy comprising August (shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award), I'll Go to Bed at Noon (shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize) and A Curious Earth. He was born in London in 1961, and published several prize-winning collections of poetry before turning to fiction. His collection of poetry We Were Pedestrians was shortlisted for the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize. His most recent poetry collection, Seacunny, was published in 2012. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

A comic sensibility closer to Alan Bennett or Tom Sharpe. Woodward's rueful amusement isn't frivolity, it's a world view * Financial Times * Gerard Woodward falls squarely between the comic lunacy of American short-form virtuoso George Saunders and the everyday rhapsodies of Raymond Carver * Time Out * Woodward is a skilful writer, with a fertile imagination * Guardian * At his best, Gerard Woodward is one of our finest writers . . . he writes with subtlety and skill * Daily Telegraph * I thought Legoland was incredible. The stories are SO good at capturing the weird nuances of apparently straightforward, everyday interactions. It's not an exaggeration to say that reading them has made me look at the world more carefully. -- Rebbeca Wait, author of THE FOLLOWERS There are echoes of Milan Kundera and Roald Dahl in these dark and gleeful explorations of the surreal . . . Woodward's stories astonish: they seem to offer a predictable direction, then swerve elsewhere. And just like the toy that lends the title story's playground its name, these narratives are meticulously designed, building into dazzling and surprising structures...the stories range in genre from realism to pseudo-fairytale and in geography from postwar Germany to Colorado...remarkable...a gifted writer * Guardian *