…the dialogue is certainly amusing. Readers who enjoy send-ups of crime novels, talk-radio hosts, city pomposities and rural eccentricities will queue up for the series…” — Kirkus Reviews
“[THE BOOK STOPS HERE] succeeds as a light farce . . . The book’s high point is the acerbic portrayal of the personalities making up the Mobile Library Steering Committee, but most every page will elicit a grin, if not a chuckle.” — Publishers Weekly
“[Sansom’s] fish-out-of-water dilemmas and encounters with kooky locals will resonate with Alexander McCall Smith fans” — Publishers Weekly
“[a] comic masterpiece” — The Belfast Telegraph
“A work of tender and bonhomous refraction. ...Sansom is emphatically unpretentious in his portrayal of the ordinary lives of ordinary folk, and his gentle humor buoys their humdrum lives…pleasing, amusing and honest.” — New York Newsday
“A wonderfully comic novel...Ian Sansom has an acute sense of the absurd, and does not allow sympathetic intimacy to stand in the way of some wicked barbs.” — Daily Mail (London)
“A humane, big-hearted and sometimes devastatingly funny book.” — LA Weekly
“A clever, affectionate poke in the ribs…. Sansom...discovers an exceptionally lively world.” — Kirkus Reviews
“An endearing first novel...People cross paths, hook up, split up, say good-bye. Narrative unity derives less from the story than from the amiable persona of the narrator himself, in all his rambling, digressive warmth, and his mild insistence throughout — Daily Telegraph (London)
A work of tender and bonhomous refraction. ...Sansom is emphatically unpretentious in his portrayal of the ordinary lives of ordinary folk, and his gentle humor buoys their humdrum lives…pleasing, amusing and honest.
A humane, big-hearted and sometimes devastatingly funny book.
[a] comic masterpiece
A wonderfully comic novel...Ian Sansom has an acute sense of the absurd, and does not allow sympathetic intimacy to stand in the way of some wicked barbs.
An endearing first novel...People cross paths, hook up, split up, say good-bye. Narrative unity derives less from the story than from the amiable persona of the narrator himself, in all his rambling, digressive warmth, and his mild insistence throughout
In Sansom's satiric fourth mobile library mystery (after 2008's The Book Stops Here), Israel Armstrong, an English Jewish vegetarian mobile librarian and amateur sleuth, embarks on yet another bumblingly endearing case in Tumdrum, “on the northernmost coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland.” The day after Israel allows 14-year-old Lyndsay Morris to borrow a “bad book” (i.e., Philip Roth's American Pastoral), Lyndsay, daughter of prominent Unionist candidate Maurice Morris, disappears. The coincidence is enough to make Israel suspect in the eyes of his boss, Linda Wei, a lesbian Chinese single mother, as well as the police and a nosy newspaper reporter. Never mind the thin plot and minimal detection. Sansom uses the naïve Israel to poke fun at politics, religion, prejudice, and pretensions of all sorts. Readers will particularly enjoy the passages devoted to the efforts to keep books like American Pastoral out of the hands of the young and impressionable. (Jan.)
Ireland's only English Jewish vegetarian mobile librarian suffers through a bout of melancholia. Why bathe? he wonders. Why even get out of bed? Israel Armstrong, days away from turning 30, months away from having his former girlfriend Gloria answer his calls, has taken to his fetid bed in the rented, barely livable, redone chicken coop he now calls home in the relentlessly boring town of Tumdrum in the north of the north of northern Ireland. Ted, his Malaprop-spouting bookmobile partner, chases Israel out of bed and back to work, where the unthinkable happens: Israel lets a 14-year-old girl borrow one of the Unshelved, books deemed too unseemly for young eyes. Did Philip Roth's American Pastoral convince young Lyndsay to run away? Library director Linda Wei blames Israel, and so does Lyndsay's pa, ousted Unionist politician Maurice Morris, now campaigning for reelection. Veronica, the sultry reporter who earlier dangled herself before Israel, makes him an offer he can't refuse: Find Lyndsay or become the tabloid headline of the day. So off he goes to interview Lyndsay's mum, ex-boyfriend, fellow members of a charismatic religious group, and so forth. Their conversations allow the puckish author to satirize food, church, politics, kids, the Irish, the English, J.K. Rowling, audioWhither the mystery? one might ask. But that would be churlish in light of all the rollicking wit from satirist Sansom (The Book Stops Here, 2008, etc.).
