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The Pothunters
The Pothunters
Sep 10, 2025 12:45 AM

Author:P.G. Wodehouse

The Pothunters

When someone breaks into the cricket pavilion and steals two silver cups, the whole school is agog. Could it possibly be an inside job? Nothing less than the honour of St Austin's is at stake, not to mention the reputation of Jim Thomson, an excellent athlete with a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.In this charming novel of school life, the first book he published, Wodehouse demonstrates right away a talent for story telling and characterisation, not to mention a sharp ear for the inflections of schoolboy speech, still recognisable after more than a century. But what marks the story out from others of the same sort are the many humorous touches which hint at a master of comedy in the making.

Reviews

The handsome bindings are only the cherry on top of what is already a cake without compare.

—— Evening Standard

Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in

—— Evelyn Waugh

Poetic... engaging...full of witty observations, dialogue and characterisations

—— Bookmunch

One of those books that you look back on and wonder how so much has happened in such a few pages. I think the last book that made me want to reach into its pages and rescue the main character to quite this extent was Tess of the D'Urbervilles... powerful. [Na Ga] is a character that will stay with me for a long time

—— www.bookbag.co.uk

Consistently inventive, evocative and uncompromising. Haunting is a word much overused, but Lark and Termite is exactly that: a novel whose elegant lingering images are hard to shake from the memory. This is a glowing, powerful and immensely readable paean to the power of family

—— Independent

Jayne Anne Phillips's intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original

—— Michiko Kakutani , New York Times

An intense tale of love, loss and the bond of family that survive, almost miraculously, over time and space... What could have been a fairly conventional story... is transformed by Phillips into something extraordinary

—— Neel Mukherjee , The Times

'A moving meditation on the redemptive power of family and love'

—— Observer

Phillip's writing is distinctive, audacious and powerful

—— Daily Telegraph

Remarkable. It is a strange and joyous book which will yield much to the patient reader

—— Elis Ni Dhuibhne , Irish Times

Lark and Termite, Phillips' fourth novel, has high expectations to live up to. That it meets, and even surpasses, such expectations is only one of its many achievements

—— Angel Gurria-Quintana , Financial Times

'A richly textured novel with a wondrous story at its heart about the many permutations of love'

—— Sunday Herald

compulsive, innovative, challenging

—— Lesley McDowell , Independent on Sunday

A moving meditation on the redemptive power of family and love.

—— Sarah Churchwell , Observer

The voices and structures are remarkable

—— Meaghan Delahunt , The Scotsman

Tender story

—— Angel Gurria-Quintana , Financial Times

With its almost mystical exploration of love in all its forms, this is a tender portrayal of a family that proves unsinkable

—— Elizabeth Buchan , The Sunday Times

Phillips's characters...are alive and intimately rendered; their warmth suffuses the novel like low-burning embers

—— Eimear Nolan , Irish Times

Compelling... utterly engaging... for anyone whose interest in his subjects is great to enough to bear their unflinching portrayal The Kindly Ones is an essential novel

—— Chris Power , The Times

It's an amazing picture of evil, wonderfully written (and very well translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell), and left me feeling as though I had supped with the damned

—— Jane Knight , The Times
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