Tristram Shandy is one of the funniest novels in the English language. It's also one of the first great experimental literary works

A mad, recursive, literary joke

An extraordinary comic tour de force

The ultimate novel about writing a novel

An amazing book, seeming like a modern experimental novel but written in the 18th century by an Anglican clergyman. You can dip in and out of it with constant pleasure.

Has inspired and provoked writers as various as Dickens, Joyce and Salman Rushdie

Tristram Shandy’s open, digressive form offers both an alternative to the inevitable reductions of plot and a foil to the tyranny of the will to system.