A wildly entertaining new novel brilliantly skewering our contemporary world, from our fiercest writer
Meet Jonathan De'Ath, aka 'the Butcher'. The curious thing about the Butcher is that everyone who knows him - his washed-up old university lecturer father, his jumbling-bumbling mother, his hippy-dippy brothers, his so-called friends, his spooky colleagues and his multitudinous lovers - they all apply this epithet to him quite independently, each in ignorance of the others. He knows everyone calls him 'the Butcher' behind his back, but he also knows that they don't know the only real secret he maintains, encrypted in the databanks of his steely mind: Colonel Gawain Thomas, husband, father, highly-trained tank commander - is Jonathan De'Ath's longtime lover.
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including Great Apes, The Book of Dave, How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008, Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012, and Shark. His most recent novel, Phone, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. He lives in south London.