Wild Abandon
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Wild Abandon is Joe Dunthorne's outrageously funny novel of life in a Welsh commune.
Kate and Albert, sister and brother, are not yet the last two human beings on earth, but Albert has high hopes. The secluded communal farm they grew up on is - after twenty years - disintegrating, along with their parents' marriage. They both try to escape: Kate, at seventeen, to suburbia and Albert, at eleven, into preparations for the end of the world.
However, Don, the group's leader and their father, is convinced he can save everything, if only he can bring his followers into the modern age. How? By force of personality, strict self-sufficiency and a rave with a 10k soundsystem. Understandably, Albert and Kate have other ideas . . .
'Populated by flawed, occasionally exasperating, lovable and, above all, thoroughly imagined characters, Wild Abandon is about what happens to children when parents become consumed by their beliefs . . . A terrific novel' Nick Hornby, Guardian, 'Books of the Year'
'A joy. Warm, funny, clever' Sunday Times
'An engaging, emotionally stimulating, chuckle-out-loud read' Time Out
'Occupying a terrain that lies between the very British humour of Jonathan Coe and the zeitgeisty ambition of Douglas Coupland . . . insightful comic writing . . . that manages to be both tender and biting' Independent on Sunday
'A creation of some genius. Dunthorne is a naturally comic writer' Daily Telegraph
'Just as funny and acutely perceptive [as] Submarine' Independent
Joe Dunthorne was born and brought up in Swansea. He is the author of Submarine, which has been translated into fifteen languages and made into an acclaimed film directed by Richard Ayoade, and Wild Abandon, which won the 2012 Encore Award. His debut poetry pamphlet was published by Faber and Faber. He lives in London.
www.joedunthorne.com
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his semiamusing second novel, Dunthorne (Submarine) once again saddles children with problematic parents. Eleven-year-old Albert and 17-year-old Kate chafe under the attention of their father, Don, and mother, Freya, who have founded a self-sustaining commune called Blaen-y-Llyn in South Wales. Home-schooled Kate yearns to be normal and forces her parents to enroll her in the local school, while Albert, obsessed with end times, is actively planning for the apocalypse. Meanwhile, the shrinking community is falling apart; Freya is thinking about taking Albert and leaving Don; and Kate moves in with her boyfriend's middle-class family. As a last ditch attempt to hold everything together, Don throws a rave and invites the local townsfolk. Dunthorne proves himself an equal opportunity satirist of both neo-hippie and petit bourgeois pretensions: after suffering a nervous breakdown, commune cofounder Patrick has a difficult time readjusting to the outside world, and Kate's boyfriend's father seems to have an agenda for Kate. Dunthorne revels in all the indignities his back-to-the-land characters have to endure, even returning to the early '90s recession to dramatize the commune's founding. Yet the satire is disappointingly uneven, and the uniformly unpleasant characterizations leave a sour aftertaste.
