Anansi Boys
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4.5 • 76 Ratings
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
THE NO.1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, AND COMPANION NOVEL TO AMERICAN GODS.
HIGHLY ANTICIPATED TELEVISION SERIES COMING TO AMAZON PRIME VIDEO.
'Neil could never have known that he was writing for a confused Jamaican kid who, without even knowing it, was still staggering from centuries of erasure of his own gods and monsters' MARLON JAMES
'A warm, funny, immensely entertaining story about the impossibility of putting up with your relations - especially if they happen to be Gods' SUSANNA CLARKE
'It's virtually impossible to read more than ten words by Neil Gaiman and not wish he would tell you the rest of the story' OBSERVER
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'People think that funny and serious are mutually exclusives. They think they're opposites, and that's not actually true' NEIL GAIMAN
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Everything changes for Fat Charlie Nancy, the South London boy so called by his father, the day his dad drops dead while doing karaoke.
Charlie didn't know his estranged father was a god - Anansi the trickster, master of mischief and social disorder. He never knew he had a brother either.
Now brother Spider is on his doorstep, about to make life more interesting . . . and a lot more dangerous. It's a meeting that will take Fat Charlie from his London home to Florida, the Caribbean, and the very beginning of the world itself. Or the end of the world, depending on which way you're looking.
NEIL GAIMAN.
WITH STORIES COME POSSIBILITIES.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If readers found the Sandman series creator's last novel, American Gods, hard to classify, they will be equally nonplussed and equally entertained by this brilliant mingling of the mundane and the fantastic. "Fat Charlie" Nancy leads a life of comfortable workaholism in London, with a stressful agenting job he doesn't much like, and a pleasant fianc e, Rosie. When Charlie learns of the death of his estranged father in Florida, he attends the funeral and learns two facts that turn his well-ordered existence upside-down: that his father was a human form of Anansi, the African trickster god, and that he has a brother, Spider, who has inherited some of their father's godlike abilities. Spider comes to visit Charlie and gets him fired from his job, steals his fianc e, and is instrumental in having him arrested for embezzlement and suspected of murder. When Charlie resorts to magic to get rid of Spider, who's selfish and unthinking rather than evil, things begin to go very badly for just about everyone. Other characters including Charlie's malevolent boss, Grahame Coats ("an albino ferret in an expensive suit"), witches, police and some of the folk from American Gods are expertly woven into Gaiman's rich myth, which plays off the African folk tales in which Anansi stars. But it's Gaiman's focus on Charlie and Charlie's attempts to return to normalcy that make the story so winning along with gleeful, hurtling prose.
Customer Reviews
Unique
There is no way even to try to explain this book. It’s a wonderful mix of comic novel with some very dark moments and extraordinary worlds , all mixed to … the ordinary.
What makes this story original and coherent in some absurd way is the vision of the author who has found a very personal way to make the reader shake with fear, cry for laughters and cringe for embarrassment.