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The Swoop! & The Military Invasion of America
The Swoop! & The Military Invasion of America
Sep 2, 2025 6:25 PM

Author:P.G. Wodehouse

The Swoop! & The Military Invasion of America

"Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation.”

Clarence Chugwater is not a Boy Scout for nothing. It is summer 1909 and everyone is too interested in the Test Match to notice that England has been invaded by the Germans. And the Russians. And the Chinese. Not to mention a ‘boisterous band of the Young Turks’, a mad Mullah, and a brace of North African pirates. The government has recently abolished the army so there is nothing to be done about it anyway, except give a masterly display of polite indifference. But this would be to reckon without patriotic Clarence, ‘Boy of Destiny’, who alone is prepared to stand up to the foe, and who devises a highly unorthodox plan to restore his country to freedom…

The Swoop! Or, How Clarence Saved England reprints the 33 black and white drawings by C. Harrison that accompanied the first edition. It is supplemented by The Military Invasion of America, in which Clarence’s story is humorously transplanted across the Atlantic.

Reviews

The Everyman edition promises to be a splendid celebration of the divine Plum

—— The Independent

The modern horror novel owes an enormous debt to Poe, and the novel of psychological horror owes him almost everything

—— Spectator

If you love thrillers, you have to read these stories

—— Observer

Poe's work as a whole is a series of haunting improvisations on themes from the macabre that are hard to categorise, dazzlingly original and posthumously influential on an extraordinary range of writers from Baudelaire and RL Stevenson to Yeats, Wilde and Borges

—— Observer

A comic riot of a novel.

—— Sunday Times - Must Reads

Worst. Person. Ever. succeeds by virtue of its verbal energy, the brio of its invention, the snappiness with which successive gags and ever more appalling atrocities are piled on.

—— Financial Times

Coupland has penned a bitterly funny tale of our time and created one of the grossest characters to deliver it.

—— Sport

Worst. Person. Ever., challenges the present-day with excess, satire, and biting critique

—— Dazed Digital

Sathnam Sanghera’s entertaining story is a “remix” of Arnold Bennett’s classic novel The Old Wives’ Tale Playful wit infuses the novel … But behind the humour and the plot twists, is an important novel that explores an often overlooked part of this country's history … That the story of the Victorian mercantile class told in Bennett’s novel is so easily transposed onto the community Sanghera grew up in nearly a century later is absolutely fascinating, and by recognizing and exploiting this with excellent effect, he examines the nationwide story of British immigration through the prism of the Punjabi Sikh experience.

—— Independent

A funny and touching read ... Brilliant A superbly updated version of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. At its heart, this is a simple story of family … yet, all this is handled throughout with the lightest of touches, so that on reaching the end, you want to begin again to pick up the subtle nuances of this book

—— Psychologies

It is very good and has many of the qualities found in Bennett’s masterpiece: acute observation of society and societal change, thoroughly imagined and well depicted characters, mastery of naturalistic detail, and generosity of tone. It is very enjoyable … It does what the novel can still do better than any other art-form: showing you that other people think and act in a manner very different from your own, but one which is equally valid … It is [a novel] which celebrates that most necessary of qualities, kindness … It is acute about human frailty, but also understanding of this. It is often funny and its great merit is its humanity. It’s worthy homage to Arnold Bennett.

—— Scotsman

Marriage Material is a comic feast, full of delectable matter. It does what only the best comic fiction can do: it robes important social subjects in laughter. Then, too, by the end, I felt I knew Sathnam Sanghera’s characters intimately and felt so warmly about them, I didn’t want them to go: no mean feat, given that I’ve never been into a Wolverhampton corner shop, either in Enoch Powell's scurrilous heyday or more recently. This is a splendid debut.

—— Lisa Appignanesi

Marriage Material is a wonderfully engaging book, full of heart and wit. Its exploration of what it means to feel torn is rich and subtle. Its characters stay with you. Its jokes make you laugh in the night.

—— Susie Boyt

It will take virtually no pages for you to be hooked

—— Harper's Bazaar - 5 Books for the Autumn

Sanghera’s Marriage Material has humour [and] cultural relevance…Anyone who’s grown up as a second generation immigrant can relate to the themes seen here … I’d heartily recommend Marriage Material to anyone who needs a little push to reconnect to where they’ve come from, be it Copenhagen or Punjab.

—— Stylist

Sanghera’s story captures a time of extraordinary changes in Wolverhampton […] Discrimination, mixed-race marriages and the changing face of Britain appear in both Sanghera’s timelines. As the novel progresses, the stories collide and there are startling revelations, humour and mystery. It is smartly crafted, weaving in droll observations about immigrant life and the defensiveness of south Asians living away from home, while also providing a thoughtful commentary on the casual racism of Britain, the tedium of always being out of place and the complexities of belonging in an increasingly heterogeneous world.

—— Financial Times

Sanghera ... tells a larger story about the big political and economic struggles of the past half-century. He examines changing attitudes to immigration, the rise of big-box stores and the hollowing out of Britain’s industrial centres ... Sanghera, who grew up in Wolverhampton himself, does a good job of capturing the complications of progress.

—— The Economist

Maxine is a fraud investigator and mother of two in pre-9/11 Manhattan, but a peek into the books of a tech billionaire uncovers – this is a Pynchon novel after all – a vast conspiracy.

—— Time

But the big surprise of Bleeding Edge is how tender it is. The novel makes an appeal for the survival of innocence in a hostile world. Pynchon wants to find a way out of paranoia and conspiracy, even as he forces the reader deeper into them… The novel really feels like the work of a writer coming to terms with the world. And while he may not like much of what he finds out there, he wants there to be a place for innocence somewhere. As everything falls apart, there's a real yearning in Bleeding Edge for at least some things to hang together.

—— David Barrett , Standpoint

Enormous fun… Deserves a place alongside Pynchon’s finest works.

—— James Kidd , Independent on Sunday

Pynchon’s latest novel is a historical romance set in during the internet’s infancy in the spring of 2001.

—— Jo Ellison and Violet Henderson , Vogue

Bleeding Edge is a romp. On full display are Pynchon’s trademark linguistic and imaginative acrobatics… It may sound frivolous but an emotional maturity counterpoints the silly songs, deliberately bad puns, and pop-cultural references

—— Irish Examiner

When he’s in his hardboiled vein, [Pynchon] writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year.

—— Tom Stoppard , Guardian

Pynchon's best novel since Mason & Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

—— Tim Martin , Telegraph

Pynchon at his most hilarious, it gave way to more sombre realities involving a suspicious Silicon Alley tech company and its possible links to international terrorism and who knows what else.

—— Uncut

Suspenseful and darkly humorous.

—— Michael Dirda , Times Literary Supplement

Intriguing, and probably the most straightforwardly readable of his books.

—— Gordon Brewer , Herald

A thrilling ride through the first tech bubble, filled with "bleeding edge" technology... Accomplished, funny and digressive.

—— Financial Times

Pynchon's take on the attack on the Twin Towers. Will he reject the conspiracy theories of the "truthers" or spin some new conspiracies of his own? I think the answer is both. But I wouldn't swear to it.

—— Gordon Brewer , Scotsman

· Pynchon delivered a piece of typically raggedy brilliance with Bleeding Edge.

—— Stuart Kelly , Scotsman

Engrossing, hilarious and shocking.

—— Jonathan Jones , Guardian

Pynchon’s high-energy writing crackles with dark wit and foreboding

—— Mail on Sunday

Playful and paranoid New York noir

—— Adam Boulton , New Statesman

Readers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about an open-ended mystery, but for those who don’t care so much about the destination, the journey is more than worth it

—— Stephen Joyce , Nudge
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