Joe Speedboat
Tommy Wieringa
Joe Speedboat
Tommy Wieringa
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Description
'Never just another would-be inspirational read about overcoming adversity, Wieringa’s novel offers a rewarding journey into the unfamiliar. It is also witty, thoughtful and surprisingly tender as Frankie comes to realise that he has got a life to live that is still worth the living.'
'[A] brilliant coming-of-age story with an outlandish twist … There are more coming-of-age novels than dikes in Holland, but this wonderfully weird novel is not one to miss.'
'The triumph and tragedy that pepper the story feel authentically random, though the familiar coming-of-age structure lends the book a directionless, episodic feel … Wieringa’s tale takes on the feel of a good road-trip novel perfectly suited to his cast of eccentrics. The setting of rural Holland is convincingly rendered, and the low-key freakishness (think Garp) keeps things at just the right degree of weird.'
'[An] offbeat story of a group of boys searching for meaning . . . This work conjures John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany but with a lighter touch.'
'Winsome … Wieringa’s protagonist, Frankie, has an attitude attune to Holden Caulfield, without the anxiety and the quirks … [Frankie’s] unwavering and confident … in-your-face voice … applies literature to life, lyrically, with an attention to minutiae … Charismatic, intelligent, he’s the kinetic energy that thrusts the narrative forward.'
'A wonderfully eccentric and uproariously funny novel.'
'A lovely book, full of eccentricity and charm.'
Praise for Tommy Wieringa:
‘The best contemporary novels are a quest made out of literary and moral ambition. Those who have successfully pursued this Holy Grail in recent times are Bolaño with his The Savage Detectives, Sebald in Austerlitz, Coetzee with Disgrace and the late Philip Roth. From now on, to that august list must be added the name of Tommy Wieringa.’
Tommy Wieringa was born in 1967 and grew up partly in the Netherlands, and partly in the tropics. He began his writing career with travel stories and journalism, and is the author of several internationally bestselling novels. His fiction has been longlisted for the Booker International Prize, shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Oxford/Weidenfeld Prize, and has won Holland’s Libris Literature Prize. Sam Garrett has translated some fifty novels and works of nonfiction. He has won prizes and appeared on shortlists for some of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, and is the only translator to have twice won the British Society of Authors’ Vondel Prize for Dutch–English translation.