It’s 2008 and Joe Gladstone’s North Cumbrian gourmet guesthouse is losing a packet, not least because of the unusual requirements he makes of his would-be guests. Meanwhile, his wife Liz has embarked on her first extramarital affair at the age of seventy, and has started having spiritual visions. John Murray’s latest comic extravaganza also features a wild dialect epic, set in 2018, about political tyranny and the tyranny of fashion, as well as some diverting table talk about the ethics of eating and drinking.
The listen up north! blog features sound recordings of both John Murray reading from The Legend of Liz & Joe and also an interview with the author.
Clare Dudman interviewed John Murray in her blog, The Keeper of the Snails
‘... an extremely funny and wickedly clever book.’
William Palmer, in the Independent, 29 July 2009.
‘A Flann O’Brienesque romp . . . beautifully written and laugh-out-loud funny.’
Independent on Sunday
George Geraghty, satirical cartoonist, aged 65, reflects on long-dead father, Bill, speaker of 55 languages and absolutely barking mad. Besides the elegiac sadness rippling throughout this novel, it is one of the most uproariously funny books you will read particularly when Bill's birds, Gerund and Participle, converse in Basque and medieval Aramaic.
Martin Tierney The Herald Glasgow, 3 June 2006
Very funny – Murray has a fine eye for life's custard pies.
Kate Saunders, The Times, 24 June 2006
The Legend of Liz and Joe is a profound book. The writing is witty, relevant and there are passages that are strikingly beautiful. This is apparent immediately, but there is more to the book than this. [...] the ideas took a little while to unfurl in my head. [...] I think they will persist.
Clare Dudman, in her blog The Keeper of the Snails
The Legend of Liz & Joe costs £8.99 and was published in July 2009.
ISBN: 978-1-906601-07-2
John Murray was born in West Cumbria and now lives in Brampton, near Carlisle. In 1984 he founded the prestigious fiction magazine Panurge, which he and David Almond edited until 1996. He has published a collection of stories, Pleasure, for which he received the Dylan Thomas Award in 1988, and nine critically acclaimed novels: Samarkand, Kin, Reiver Blues, John Dory, Jazz Etc, Murphy's Favourite Channels, Radio Activity, A Gentleman's Relish and The Legend of Liz and Joe.
John Dory won a Lakeland Book of the Year Award in 2002, and Jazz Etc. was longlisted for the Man-Booker Prize in 2003. His 2004 novel, Murphy's Favourite Channels, was a Novel of the Week in the Daily Telegraph, and Radio Activity was the people's choice in voting for the best Cumbrian novel ever.
His web site is at johnmurraynovelist.wordpress.com
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