Sprout Mask Replica

Jul 17, 2025 3:29 PM

Author:Robert Rankin

Sprout Mask Replica

His great-great grandfather died at the Battle of Little Big Horn. He wasn't with Custer though. He was holding a sprout-bake and tent meeting in the field next door and went over to complain about the noise. His great-grandfather (also a sprout farmer and man of the cloth) always wore weighted shoes while in the pulpit, to avoid any embarrassing levitations during moments of extreme rapture. His grandfather (lay precher, large sideburns, taste for sprouts) spoke only in rhyming couplets (to please the ghost of his dead wife) and owned a pig called Belshazzar that dined exclusively upon the aforementioned vegetables and did strange things on the back parlour wall. His father (an elder in the Sacred Order of the Golden Sprout) practised body-modification in an attempt to win a bet with his brother (a monk) that he could shin up the inside of a drainpipe.

And there was him. And he was weird. Can this be Robert Rankin's autobiography? He swears that it isn't, but as a self-confessed teller of tall tales, whoever is going to believe him?

Reviews

'Stark raving genius'

—— The Times

'He does for England what Spike Milligan does for Ireland. There can be no higher praise'

—— John Clute , Mail on Sunday

Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found this special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere

—— Gore Vidal

The marriage of the verbal and the visual in The Castle of Crossed Destinies seems almost prodigious. It is as if sulpher and mercury had at last fused into gold

—— Times Literary Supplement

Mythical and mystical, Mistress of Spices is reminiscent of fables and fairy tales. . . . The story Divakaruni tells is transporting, but it is her gift for metaphor that makes this novel live and breathe, its pages as redolent as any freshly ground spice.

—— Booklist

For ARRANGED MARRIAGE, 'As irresistible as the impulse which leads her characters to surface to maturity, raising their heads above the floods of silver ignorance'

—— New York Times Book Review

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