Description:

Henry Wilt, tied to a daft job and a domineering wife, has just been passed over for promotion yet again. Ahead of him at the Polytechnic stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers, joiners, butchers and the like. And things are no better at home where his massive wife, Eva, is given to boundless and unpredictable fits of enthusiasm - for transcendental meditation, yoga or the trampoline.

But if Wilt can do nothing about his job, he realises he can do something about his wife - and as each day passes, his fantasies grow more murderous and more real.

Review

"His best novel yet ... Mr Sharpe has taken a great stride towards being considered a major craftsman in the art of farce" -- Auberon Waugh Evening Standard "This delightful book ... lives, rises and triumphs by a slicing wit" Daily Mirror "Superb farce ... If you don't laugh your head off, Crippen wasn't guilty" Tribune "Mr. Sharpe's farce has a gritty satirical edge to it, and the world his embattled central character inhabits is all too real" Sunday Times "Tom Sharpe piles slapstick upon slapstick with the ingenious dexterity of a music-hall illusionist" Sunday Telegraph

About the Author

Tom Sharpe was born in 1928 and educated at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He did his national service in the Marines before going to South Africa in 1951, where he did social work before teaching in Natal. He had a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg from 1957 until 1961, and from 1963 to 1972 he was a lecturer in History at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. He is the author of sixteen bestselling novels, including Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape which were serialised on television, and Wilt which was made into a film. The other novels in the Wilt series are The Wilt Alternative, Wilt On High, Wilt in Nowhere and The Wilt Inheritance. In 1986 Tom Sharpe was awarded the XXIIIeme Grand Prix de l'Humour Noir Xavier Forneret and in 2010 he received the inaugural BBK La Risa de Bilbao Prize. He is married and divides his time between Cambridge, England and northern Spain.