Critics' Opinion:
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Published Aug 2011
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A darkly funny and surprisingly tender debut novel about two brothers, one of whom refuses to leave his bed on his 25th birthday.
Mal Ede, a child of untamed manners and unbounded curiosity, is the eccentric eldest son of an otherwise typical middle-class family. But as the wonders of childhood fade into the responsibilities of adulthood, Mal's spirits fade too. On his twenty-fifth birthday, disillusioned, Mal goes to bed - back to his childhood bed - and never emerges again.
Narrated by Mal's shy, diligent younger brother, Bed details Mal's subsequent extreme and increasingly grotesque transformation: immobility and a gargantuan appetite combine, over the course of two decades, to make him the fattest man in the world. Despite his seclusion and his refusal to explain his motivations, Mal's condition earns him worldwide notoriety and a cult of followers convinced he is making an important statement about modern life. But Mal's actions will also change the lives of his haunted parents, his brother and the woman they both love, Lou.
In Bed, David Whitehouse has put a magnifying glass on contemporary society and is a mordantly funny and ultimately redemptive parable about mortality, obesity, celebrity, depression and the broken promises of adulthood.
"Starred Review... a distinguished and accessible story out of a profoundly strange experience." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. While the reader may ask - why? - the journey to the answers is remarkable, nuanced and coy." - Kirkus Reviews
"...[A] strange but beguiling tale. Its short, punchy chapters propel the story along to a satisfying conclusion." - Library Journal
"Staggering, inventive, and heartbreakingly beautiful." - Esquire (UK)
"The best new novel I've read in ages." - The Guardian (UK)
"Sad and funny and pretty brilliant, too." - The Observer (UK)
"David Whitehouse has taken what might be a gimmicky hook in a lesser writer's hands - a romance triangulating around a bedridden media spectacle, the world's most obese man - and turned it, through lapidary prose, into a soulful meditation on a fraternal love as singular as it is universal." - Teddy Wayne, author of Kapitoil
"Bed is a deftly-told wonder. Mr. Whitehouse's writing is accomplished, poetic, and deeply affecting." - Joe Meno, author of Hairstyles of the Damned
This information about Bed 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.
David Whitehouse's first novel, Bed, winner of the 2012 Betty Trask Prize, has been published in eighteen countries. He has several TV and film projects in development with Film4, Warp, the BBC, and others. He writes regularly for the Guardian, and The Times, and is currently the Editor-at-Large of ShortList magazine.
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