Harold: A Novel

"And the American stand-up Steven Wright, known for his deadpan one-liners, has also ventured into fiction for the first time with Harold , an absurdist , stream-of-consciousness novel set over a single day in a third-grade classroom, as thoughts flit through the mind of an eight-year-old boy. As The New York Times explains , “The book’s central metaphor is a description of Harold’s thought process as a room with one window and a riot of birds flying around. Occasionally one flies out. That represents an idea. It’s a view of creativity that is random and unpredictable. Isn’t it a bit scary? What happens if the birds stop flying out?” It won’t be for everyone but it’s an interestingly experimental approach from one of the most influential comedians of our age. I’m excited about Megan Nolan’s second novel, Ordinary Human Failings , which will be out in July. This is her follow-up to the incisive Acts of Desperation , which took the form of a post-mortem of an obsessive, power-imbalanced relationship. This new book follows an ambitious news reporter whose investigation into a child’s sudden death on a 1990s London housing estate leads him to an Irish immigrant family with a notorious reputation. But are they at fault? Nolan specialises in the creation of emotional landscapes so bright one can barely look at them."