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This peculiar comic novel concerns two men and a woman and looks at how they came to be where they were when they met and the effect that meeting had upon them.

One man is Epitome Quirkstandard, a benighted aristocrat in the Wodehousian tradition whose staff have abandoned him to go and fight in the First World War and who discovers the taste for learning - especially when he attempts to make his own breakfast.

The other man is Mr. Crepuscular, a man who has written a multitude of educative pamphlets that he kindly rents out to Quirkstandard. As an illiterate scamp he ran away to join the circus, but through a series of unlikely adventures he ends up as a wise quasi-Buddhist who understands that sometimes the circus just isn't the right place to be.

And the woman is Quirkstandard's aunt, Penelope Penultimate, a beautiful but severe lady of mature years who spent the majority of her life abroad taking parties of teenage girls on adventure holidays, with no insurance.

The story comes to a head when she issues an invitation to the men to come to her cottage in the country for the weekend. When they do so all manner of storylines come together, leading to unexpected revelations, arguments, jealousies, tensions, parlour games, picnics and nudity. Oh, it's so exciting.

Along the way the book is filled with historical and biographical asides as it covers the broad sweep of life from the sawdust circuses of the 1860s, through the Amazon Basin of the 1890s, right up to the ultra-modern trench-warfare of the 1910s. It is discursive and meandering in a way that makes it a particularly diminutive descendant of Tristram Shandy or Three Men In A Boat or something akin to Douglas Adams without the science-fiction. Some people like this sort of thing.

The author, A.F. Harrold, is a prize-winning performance poet, comedian and Englishman. More can be discovered at
www.afharrold.co.uk.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 3.0 United States License.

Audio Quality: Out of 44 ratings

Narration Quality: Out of 44 ratings

Writing Quality: Out of 44 ratings

Overall Rating: Out of 44 ratings

By: lemonbar77
Amazing, wonderful, brilliant, captivating... I do not know enough positive adjectives to describe this book. I loved the different story lines, the jumps in time and most importantly, the characters and their lives. I will say one "bad" thing. I felt robbed by the ending. I thought Epitome's fate was a cheap blow to readers/listeners who had devoted so much time to the story. I am actually having a hard time recommending this book to my friends/family because I haven't come to terms with what happened at the end.

By: Marco Ooijer
At first, I felt the story was brilliant. Reminded me of Jeeves and Wooster, and in a good sense too. This really transcended that TV-series' setting-imposed story-limitations. But I'm affraid that this high standard wasn't maintained throughout the story. I must it it all got a bit complicated when the storylines started weaving through time and place and this cost the story dearly (I should learn to focus more on the story I'm listening to, instead of doing other things, like I normally can do that quite easily, maybe that'd help. I guess I'll have to erelisten to the MP3s of the first parts of the story.

By: dgotham
I enjoyed your story, your characters and your reading of it. I found your characters very original. Your images were very creative. Of course my favorite was Spigot. I am glad you gave him a heros end.

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