Search results for ""Author Andrew Barrow""

Overheard mobile pronouncements are a modern phenomenon. In the street, in the park, in supermarkets, buses, waiting rooms and even, heaven help us, in libraries, it’s quite impossible to get away from these tasty or repellent fragments of other people’s private lives. Wherever you lurk, their outbursts of despair or irritation ring out: mega-tantrums, in-jokes, celebrity spottings, instant post-mortems, office politics, whoops of joy and anger, weather reports, devilishly dull domestic details, parental problems, health issues, holiday plans, money matters, dinner menus, ultimatums, gossip, sporting news, amorous overtures, business deals – and any number of time-wasting pleasantries.From the stunningly mundane to the shockingly direct, the sublime to the ridiculous, here is a brilliantly curated collection of overheard mobile conversational gems.

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‘My favourite novel and one I wish I’d written.’ ALAN BENNETT Winner of the McKitterick Prize for best first novel by an author aged over 40, and the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature. Everyone craves retirement from the Civil Service, don’t they? That time for an ageing patriarch to enjoy the fruits of a well-earned pension and the respect of his family; maybe even to indulge in a love of music halls and metropolitan life. If only people would listen and do as they were told… His fourth son William, the long-suffering narrator, is the constant butt of his father’s jokes and victim of his brothers’ indifference. But as death, divorce and other darker dramas follow, father and son slowly establish a strange harmony.

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