This series follows the misadventures of a rather unsuccessful teacher whose mundane existence is constantly disrupted by unexpected events. Facing disengaged students and a stifling personal life, he finds himself unwittingly embroiled in dramatic situations, including police investigations and murder accusations. Yet, with a blend of passive resilience, vivid imagination, and a uniquely dry wit, he navigates these chaotic circumstances. These are humorous tales filled with situational comedy, unexpected plot twists, and the distinctive charm of British satire.
Henry Wilt has been passed over for promotion yet again. Ahead of him stretch years of trying to thump literature into the heads of plasterers, carpenters, butchers and the like. And things are no better at home where his wife Eva is given to unpredictable fits of enthusiasm - for transcendental meditation, yoga or the trampoline.
A novel which continues the saga of Henry Wilt, an innate coward and hen-pecked husband whose escapades include a drunken (and very painful) battle with a rosebush, an all-consuming infatuation with an overseas student, and becoming an unwilling participant in an armed siege. From the author of RIOTOUS ASSEMBLY and GRANTCHESTER GRIND.
Wilt is still teaching at the Fenland Tech, attempting to drill English into plasterers, dozing through tedious committee meetings and occasionally getting mildly plastered in 'The Pig in a Poke' with one of his few bearable colleagues. But the even tenor of his days is rudely interrupted when the shadow of drug dealing flickers across the Tech. Suddenly Wilt becomes the target of suspicion. His colleagues believe him to be responsible for triggering a departmental inquiry, and his old adversary Inspector Flint, knowing that he's guilty of something, sees a chance to settle a number of scores. What his wife thinks is... well, what all wives think. But what none of them have reckoned with is Wilt's talent for making new enemies. What starts with an accusation of voyeurism in the staff lavatory (of the wrong gender to boot) leads, more or less directly, to a massive confrontation at a nearby US airbase with the forces of law and order on both sides and Wilt in his usual place- in the middle.
Brilliantly written and bitingly funny, Tom Sharpe's indefatigable hero is pitted against the vices of an aristocratic pervert, the merciless greed of a politician's wife and the seedy underbelly of Britain's medical facilities, deftly exposing the farcic
Stuck in a job he doesn't want but can't afford to lose, Wilt is still subject to the whims of the powers that be, both in and out of work. The demands of his snobbish wife Eva, and the stupendous school fees of his despicable quadruplet daughters, cause him the biggest headaches, apart from the hangovers that is.