The Gift - Softcover

'The Gift starts as a comedy of manners and turns into a deep and surreal exposition of the cruelty of generosity ... The perfect present for your successful friends.' Louisa Young, Sunday Times

'Few novels excite us enough to make us want to retell them to anyone willing to listen. The Gift is such a novel. With gentle literary grace and great authority, Flusfeder spins reality into a dream and back again.' Elena Lappin, Guardian

'A black comedy of rare originality ... thoughtful, amusing, wry ... it has the makings of a cult classic. Read it and read it again.' Simon Humphreys, Mail on Sunday

'This could be the perfect gift to answer all gifts.'
Observer

'This fever dream of masculine anxiety and the bad manners of affluence resolves into something unexpectedly wise and generous: a complete story and a very good one.'

Jonathan Franzen

Problem: Best friends keep giving extremely generous gifts
Solution: Give better ones in return

Philip has a lot on his mind. At home, in his unnecessarily large, excessively expensive house in south London, he is attempting to become a Taoist master of love with his wife Alice, but his quest is forever being interrupted by the requests of his twin daughters: Can we have a pony – please? I want to go to boarding school – please? At work, in his shed/office at the bottom of the garden, between countless games of Minesweep and FreeCell, Philip is trying to pay the mortgage by writing instruction manuals for Korean bread-making machines. And, at parties where he is concerned that he is not taken seriously (he has been variously mistaken as a doctor/waiter and sinologist) Philip tells the world he is a scriptwriter, even though all he has managed to pen is a story he calls Wang the Unlucky Scholar.

But, above all, Philip is worrying about his best friends Sean and Barry. The problem is simple: they give great presents. Their gifts are exquisite: a full set of Italian crockery, a handmade corkscrew from Venice. They give them indiscriminately: on birthdays, at parties and quite often for no reason whatsoever. And, most distressingly, these presents break all bounds of generosity: two FA Cup Final tickets beside the royal box, a skiing holiday for Philip's entire family. These are gifts that hurt a man's pride, these are gifts that can never be matched.