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The Family Arsenal
The Family Arsenal
Aug 15, 2025 8:17 PM

Author:Paul Theroux

The Family Arsenal

Hood, a renegade American diplomat, envisions a new urban order through the opium fog of his room. His sometimes bedmate, Mayo, has stolen a Flemish painting and is negotiating for publicity with The Times. Meanwhile, Murf the bomb-maker leaves his mark in red whilst his girlfriend Brodie bombs Euston . . .

Set in the grimy decay of south-east London, The Family Arsenal is a chilling novel of violence in the tradition of Brighton Rock.

Reviews

Only a Briton could have written Bird Brain. Eccentric and anthropomorphic, you’ll either love or hate this book. I loved it. It’s high-spirited, subversive and full of wry social observation and excellent jokes. Think Paul Torday meets Chicken Run

—— Daily Mail

A bloody brilliant book

—— Spectator

I loved it... It's a book I've been waiting for all my adult life, for it feels to me like nothing so much as a rather adult version of that other great pheasant story, Roald Dahl's Danny, the Champion of the World

—— Rachel Cooke , Observer

A wonderfully astute satire with full confidence in its own eccentricity... Ripe, rich, fun, this is a beautifully turned story, good to the very last drop

—— Sunday Times

Tom Sharpe meets Watership Down in the hugely enjoyable story of Basil “Banger” Peyton-Crumbe, a man who, having exulted in the slaughter of game birds all his life, is killed in a shooting accident and reincarnated as a pheasant…. It would not be quite accurate to say the book anthropomorphizes animals because they all retain, quite brilliantly, their animal natures, but at the same time Banger, even as a dim bird begins to gain insight into his shortcomings as a human being.Funny, astute and completely absorbing

—— Guardian

Funny, poignant and original, this country-house whodunit made me laugh out loud, and nod in recognition at its acerbic observations

—— Country Life
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