Author:Chuck Palahniuk
Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for you for the rest of their lives. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out. Victor also works at a theme park with a motley group of losers, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his mother, whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his parentage.
A wonderful writer with a raw take on modern woes
—— The FaceA raw and vital book, punctuated with outrageous, off-the-wall moments
—— New York TimesMining a dark vein opened by Bret Easton Ellis and George Saunders, Palahniuk specialises in producing nightmarish visions of American society that manage to be both repugnant and hilarious-the reckless brilliance of his imagination keeps you turning the pages
—— Literary ReviewSplendid
—— Daily TelegraphThe Return of the Native is . . . thoughtful, valedictory, poetic, tinged with the somberness of an uncertainty which seems to well up from the depths of the author's own subconscious . . . Hardy's sense of the tragic life of human beings, mere small fragments of consciousness in a vast uncaring universe, comes directly from his own youthful awareness of the place and circumstances described in the novel.
—— John Bayley