This debut collection features a series of strange and imaginative tales by award-winning author Will Wiles, known for his previous works like Care of Wooden Floors and The Way Inn. The stories explore the uncanny and the bizarre, showcasing Wiles' unique voice and inventive storytelling style. Each tale invites readers into a world that challenges perceptions and delves into the surreal, making for a captivating reading experience.
An absorbing and original epic fantasy with rich world-building and a wry take on genre conventions from a Betty Trask Award-winning author--
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ENCORE AWARDSHORTLISTED FOR THE KITSCHIES `The Way Inn' takes the polished surfaces of modern life, the branded coffee and the free wifi, and twists them into a nightmare.
'Wiles is basically Kafka, if Kafka had spent more time in British hotels and pubs' David Baddiel Will Wiles both re-invents and murders the London novel, in a spectacular act of evil, surgical intensity' Warren Ellis 'It's outstanding' Mail on Sunday, Event Magazine
For fans of Nicholson Baker and Tom McCarthy, this British debut novel is brilliant, comically surreal entertainment about a housesitting gig gone terribly, hilariously wrong. Like Edgar Allen Poe scripting "The Odd Couple," or if Kafka's "The Trial" had to do with home repair. Waterstones calls it "a black comedy about death, destruction, and interior decoration."
A witty debut novel about a house-sitting gig gone terribly, hilariously wrong. A British copywriter stays for a week at his composer friend Oskar's elegant, ultramodern apartment in a glum Eastern European city. The instructions are simple: feed the cats, don't touch the piano, and make sure nothing harms the priceless wooden floors. Content for the first time in ages, he accidentally spills some wine. Over the course of a week, both the apartment and the narrator's sanity fall apart in this original and "weirdly addictive" (Daily Mail) novel. As the situation in and out of the sleek apartment spirals out of control, more of Oskar's notes appear, taking on an insistent--even sinister--tone. Care of Wooden Floors is a must-read for anyone who's ever bungled a house-sitting gig, or felt inferior to a perfectionist friend--that is to say, all of us.