I’m on vacation this week, so I’ve chosen two humorous books to read as I relax in the sun. Both books are by English authors who I’ve read and enjoyed before.
I expect both books to be good examples of English humour, which means that they will mainly be about things that are tragic or embarrassing or unjust or all three and will be vehicles for building empathy or challenging complacency.
‘A Beginner’s Guide To Breaking And Entering’ (2024) by Andrew Hunter Murray
When he’s not being a novelist, Andrew Hunter Murray is best known for his work in comedy. His novels so far have been serious thrillers.
I loved his 2020 debut novel ‘The Last Day‘, a well-written, nuanced, thriller with an original twist on catastrophic climate change, strong, nicely paced world-building, a main character who has depth, secrets and complicated motivations, all set in set in a depressingly plausible, very British, near-future totalitarian regime that is drenched in threat, defeat, compromise and betrayal.but
I have his next book, ‘The Sanctuary‘, another thriller set in a decaying near-future, in my TBR pile.
So, despite the jokey title and the let’s-not-take-ourselves-too-seriously cover, I’m expecting ‘A Beginner’s Guide To Breaking And Entering‘ to have some teeth.
Andrew Hunter Murray is an English writer and researcher for the BBC panel show QI. He works for Ian Hislop as a writer for Private Eye magazine and is a member of the Jane Austen-themed improvisational comedy troupe Austentatious.
He is the author of The Last Day (2020), The Sanctuary (2022) and A Beginner’s Guide To Breaking And Entering (2024).
‘All The Fun Of The Fair’ (2021) by Caroline Hulse
I loved Caroline Hulse’s first two books: ‘The Adults‘ (2018), which mixed humour, real people and the (potentially fatal) stresses of spending Christmas together and ‘Like A House On Fire’ (2020) about family life so closely observed it made me laugh, wince and go – ‘So other people do that as well.’
Both books were ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ novels where the answer was, ‘Just about everything.’ Yet, even when everything is falling apart. her humour never becomes ridicule. She finds the humanity beneath the hysteria and histrionics in a way that I find uplifting.
I’m that ‘All The Fun Of The Fair‘ will give me another look at the stresses of family life and the emotional bonds that help us survive. them.
Caroline Hulse lives in Manchester with her husband and a small controlling dog.
Caroline says she writes “book club fiction with off-beat humour”. She is the author of Reasonable People (2023), All the Fun of the Fair (2021), Like a House on Fire (2020) and The Adults (2018)
Her books have been published in fourteen languages and optioned for television.
Mike Finn's Fiction 