The Wager and the Bear - John Ironmonger
John Ironmonger is a wonderful and unique writer. Let's just get that out of the way. In fact he has just got better with every book he has written (I haven't read The Coincidence Authority , but will have to remedy that; even though by my above assertion it's not going to be quite as good as later works, but it will still be brilliant I imagine). His second novel, after his debut The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder , was the wonderful The Whale and the End of the World (or Not Forgetting the Whale ), a quirky book with a serious message set in a little Cornish village during a worldwide pandemic; the novel a marvel of English character, wit, superstition and deeply felt humanity, features that took on an international flavour in The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild . Ironmonger, I'm very pleased to discover, has returned to St Piran with some quirky English characteristics for another timely work that encapsulates all the same qualities in order to approach another ...