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by Jesse Armstrong
From one of England's most lauded comedy writers, a satiric, absurd, and laugh-out-loud romp about tenderhearted, misguided dilettantes traveling through war-torn Europe, with nothing but a half-written script to protect them.
It's 1994, and war rages on in Yugoslavia - Sarajevo is under siege, and Bosnia's different ethnic groups are battling for control of the newly independent country.
Hundreds of miles away, in a posh dining room in west London, Andrew is in a similarly precarious situation: the fine balancing act of breathing, blinking, and sipping champagne at the same time. Penny, who may be the love of his life, is about to make the Great Announcement to her parents: that she, Andrew, and a handful of other young idealists are headed to Bosnia to stop the war by performing peace plays from the back of their van.
But more important than peace - does Penny like Andrew, too? Or does she like Simon, who Andrew concedes is "essentially me, only better"? Will this trip across Europe finally bring them together, or will Andrew die in a minefield? And just how long will it take the gang to figure out that Andrew does not, in fact, speak Serbo-Croat?
"Starred Review. Like the best comedic war literature, Armstrong's novel is ultimately a tragedy of the absurd." - Publishers Weekly
"A very funny British road comedy laced with ecstasy both real and imagined." - Kirkus
"Armstrong's hysterically neurotic novel about a troubling conflict offers a scathing look at art, youthful passion, and political zeal." - Booklist
"This is a novel that takes comedy out of its comfort zone, too. And the good news is that the more serious Armstrong gets, the funnier and filthier the jokes become." - Sunday Express (UK)
"Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals combines the best of sitcom-style drama with just the right amount of gravity to make it a substantial read... Armstrong's debut manages to be clever and fun while also retaining grittiness." - The Independent (UK)
"One of our most accomplished TV writers has announced himself as a novelist to watch with the best Waugh-like war story debut novel since William Boyd's A Good Man in Africa almost 35 years ago." - New Statesman (UK)
"Very funny and dry." — The Spectator (UK)
"You'll also find enough fine writing to make you realise that Armstrong is after much more than laughs." - The Times (Saturday Review) (UK)
"Humanistic and generous in its humour." - The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"A bravura comic debut...Armstrong's comic voice is versatile, original, unabashed; deployed to reveal rather than obscure." - The Guardian (UK)
This information about Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jesse Armstrong is the cocreator and writer of the BAFTA Award–winning Peep Show, as well as Fresh Meat, Bad Sugar, Babylon and, with Chris Morris, Four Lions. He was also cowriter of the The Thick of It and the Oscar-nominated In the Loop, writes for the HBO comedy series Veep, and wrote the "Entire History of You" episode for Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror television series. Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals in his first novel.
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