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  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780141046389
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $30.00

Shark




Shark attacks, LSD trips and traumatized RAF survivors: the eagerly awaited new novel from Booker-shortlisted Will Self

Shark turns upon an actual incident in WWII - mentioned in the film Jaws - when the ship which had delivered the fissile material to the south Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima was subsequently sunk by a Japanese submarine with the loss of 900 men, including 200 killed in the largest shark attack ever recorded.

When the Creep, an American resident in the 1970s at the therapeutic community in north London supervised by maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner, starts to tell rambling stories of thrashing about in the water while under attack from sharks, Busner has to decide whether they are schizoid delusions or some sort of reality.

  • Published: 22 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9780141046389
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $30.00

About the author

Will Self

Will Self is the author of three short-story collections, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (winner of the 1992 Geoffrey Faber award), Grey Area and Tough Tough Toys for Touch Tough Boys; a dyad of novellas, Cock and Bull, and a third novella, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis; and four novels, My Idea of Fun, Great Apes, How the Dead Live (shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2000) and The Book of Dave.

Together with the photographer David Gamble, he produced Perfidious Man, a sideways look at contemporary masculinity. There have been three collections of journalism, Junk Mail, Sore Sites and Feeding Frenzy. Will Self has written for a plethora of publications over the years and is a regular broadcaster on television and radio. His latest work is a collection of pieces entitled Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes.

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Praise for Shark

An exciting, mesmerizing, wonderfully disturbing book. Go with it and it will suck you under

Daily Telegraph

Breathtaking and dazzling. An exhilarating tour-de-force ... immersing the reader in a trippy Odyssey

Daily Mail

Intellectually dazzling and emotionally frazzling. Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation

Guardian

Will challenge and disturb, exasperate and entertain

Independent

Highly enjoyable, vividly, even profoundly imagined. Self is creating something rather grand

Sunday Times