“Great credit must go to Giles’s translation. The key to humour is timing and that’s easily lost in another language. Not so here. There’s a real snap to the sentences; the punchlines fall just where they need to; and the comic possibilities afforded by punctuation and paragraphing are well exploited.” George Cochrane in The Telegraph

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE AUGUST PRIZE 2023 – now in paperback from Penguin Books.

Christmas, 1983. In the aftermath of yet another furious argument, seven-year-old Andrev’s mother lets him in on a secret: his father is, in fact, not his father. And so begins a new kind of childhood, in which fathers come and go, arriving in red Volvos and sweeping his mother off her feet. Fathers can be magicians or murderers, artists or canoe enthusiasts, and, like growing pains, or the weather, they appear uninvited and leave without warning. Fathers are drawn to his mother like moths to a flame – but even she can’t control how they behave.

Vivid and joyful, raw and tender, Bloody Awful in Different Ways is a novel about growing up in the chaos of social change; about how love begins and ends; and above all, about men. Because after all, you learn an awful lot about this strange species when you have seven fathers in seven years.

‘Bloody awful? Bloody brilliant, more like’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘Pure joyous storytelling on every page … A little treasure of a book’ FREDRIK BACKMAN
‘A delight from start to finish’ JENNIE GODFREY
‘Flawless … So sharp, so beguiling, so acutely observed’ GUARDIAN