Uncle
  • Published: 30 October 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448172917
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

Uncle

Formats & editions
EBook
30 Oct 2015
Paperback
31 Aug 2013
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Quentin Blake’s quirky drawings accompany a tale that has been charming children and adults alike for nearly fifty years.

Uncle is a millionaire elephant who has a B.A. and wears a purple dressing gown. He lives in a labyrinth of skyscrapers connected by water chutes, lifts and railways, and littered with oil lakes, walls of sweets and towers of treacle. He and his followers amuse themselves by exploring his home and falling into adventures with its inhabitants, a collection of lunatics, dwarfs and ghosts. Uncle also frequently fights with the inhabitants of neighbouring Badfort, among them the repulsive Jellytussles (a quivering blob) and the cowardly Hitmouse.

'A classic in the great English nonsense tradition' Observer
  • Published: 30 October 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448172917
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208
Categories:

About the authors

J P Martin

J.P.Martin was born in Scarborough in 1879. He became a Methodist minister in 1902 and served as a missionary in South Africa and as an army chaplain in Palestine in 1918 at the time when Allenby and T.E. Lawrence overwhelmed the Turks. J.P.Martin and his wife Nancy moved circuits every three years and worked among miners and slum dwellers, as well as among the comfortably off.

He started telling the Uncle stories before the First World War and in 1934 the writers Stella Martin and R.N Currey urged him to write them down; it took thirty years before they got them accepted by Jonathan Cape in the satire rich sixties. Reviewers welcomed each of the six books as they were published between 1964 and 1973 with comparisons to Edward Lear and Alice. The Observer described him as 'a master in the great English nonsense tradition.'

J.P.Martin was 84 when Uncle was published and he charmed everyone on radio and television. He was able to enjoy his late success before he died two years later in 1966.

J.P. Martin

J. P. Martin was bom in Scarborough in 1880. He had two sons and two
daughters. He died in March 1966.

Praise for Uncle

A riot of nonsense and adventure, may well become a classic in the great English nonsense tradition

Observer

Joyously surreal, set in landscapes full of toffee, deferential choirs of badgers, heavenly water-slides and velvet chairs . . . Their pachydermous protagonist governs a benevolent plutocracy- but the books' great joy is the frequent sly and subtle lampooning of his capitalist pomp

Guardian

The books are very funny, installing a large cast of unlikely characters . . . in a world of mildly squiffy logic . . . And the illustrations are among Quentin Blake’s best work, scrawls and splotches that finally and unarguably distil character. But most important, this is political satire of a high order — Animal Farm for pre-teens, but wittier and more relevant to our own world

Independent

If there was ever a children's series generating fanatical, "cult" adoration, this is it. And deservedly so.

Guardian

Few books are laugh-out-loud funny; fewer still are the children's books that have you stifling titters on the train . . . Uncle is a brilliantly sustained exercise in nonsense, played with the straightest of faces

Financial Times

Would make a great gift for literary eccentrics of any age

The Los Angeles Times

I think Uncle stuck with me because of its combination of excess, gadgetry and eccentricity - all of which are modes of being I have attempted to emulate in my adult life. I blame J.P. Martin

Will Self

You ask any class "Who's heard of Alice in Wonderland" and up goes a forest of hands. Uncle is on the same level and should be more widely read and enjoyed

The Junior Bookshelf