One Big Damn Puzzler - Hardcover

" 'A wonderful novel, written with great humour and a rare generosity of spirit.' - DEBORAH MOGGACH 'Wonderfully funny, original and moving. Harding has knife-sharp observation, Immaculate timing and the guts to take his story as far as it will go.' - HELEN DUNMORE 'Underpinned with great love and humanity. A wonderful book.' - THE TIMES 'Very funny...truly memorable...the third ace in Harding's hand is the ending of the book...It's quite stunning.' - DAILY EXPRESS 'Harding's humour is close to hysteria...the novel is that rare thing - painfully funny.' - DAILY MAIL"

IS BE OR IS BE NOT, IS BE ONE BIG DAMN PUZZLER On a remote South Pacific island paradise the struggles of an elderly tribesman to translate Shakespeare’s Hamlet into the local pidgin English are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a young American lawyer with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. From that moment on, nothing will ever be the same . . . What follows is an ambitious and wonderfully original novel, inviting us into a sublimely imagined world teeming with life, ideas and full of wonders – the islanders with their strange notions about sex, their madly logical rituals and their tortured but addictive version of the English language, a curiously large number of people with artificial legs, and the dwarf pigs they hunt (when they can be bothered). It’s a place where magic is everywhere, where you can buy a potion to make someone fall in love with you (all it costs is a few yams) and visit the kassa house and discover that the dead may not be so dead after all. It’s a world so different it questions our own values and ideas about love, life and even death. Life-affirming, achingly funny and profoundly moving, One Big Damn Puzzler confirms John Harding as one of contemporary fiction’s most entertaining and observant chroniclers of the human condition.