A Spot of Bother | Fiction - www.zzdbook.com

A Spot of Bother

Jul 22, 2025 9:13 PM

Author:Mark Haddon

A Spot of Bother

‘A painful funny humane novel: beautifully written, addictively readable and so confident’ The Times

Discover this brilliantly comic and moving bestselling novel by the award-winning author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Porpoise.

At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray.

The family is not pleased, as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the way he cares for her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by the way the wedding planning gets in the way of her affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials.

Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.

Reviews

Brilliant...very funny

—— Sunday Telegraph

A painful, funny, humane novel: beautifully written, addictively readable and so confident

—— The Times

Wry, warm-hearted and entertaining

—— Charlotte Moore , Telegraph

Unforgettable

—— Daily Express

A witty and subtle family drama

—— Independent on Sunday

Impossible to put down

—— Wall Street Journal

Delicious fun

—— New York Times

Moves with a swift comic logic . . . An innovative and imaginative and intricate plot . . .welds Wolfe's descriptions of dinner parties, restaurant games, Wall Street trading, and courthouse chaos into more than a tour de force

—— Time

Acerbically funny

—— Christina Koning , The Times

Still very funny and smartly written a good 20 years after it was first published

—— Colin Waters , Sunday Herald

Dense with research and bulging with bombast. Yet, it has to be admitted, it's also great fun

—— Hermione Hoby , Observer

I read this novel at the end of the 1980s when greed and excess were rife, and the merger barons were making loads of money. As someone working in the City, I loved how it perfectly captured the voraciously materialistic mood. Wolfe portrays his characters with wit and accuracy.

—— Madeleine Gore , Easy Living

A page-turner

—— Daily Express

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