Submarine
"One of the ways I can tell that I am unhappy is if I get squeamish about looking up internet photos of STDs, footballers' broken legs, napalm babies."
In Submarine, Joe Dunthorne's teenage narrator, Oliver Tate, is drawn with the kind of off-kilter charm that makes you want to both be him and get with him, even though you might be ten years his senior. In his unique voice, he manages to make fumbling through adolescence an art and reminds you at once of everyone and no-one you know.
With a cover full of excellent bored-schoolboy-style sketches, Submarine is set in Swansea, Wales, in the late 1990s when life was simple and lived beach-side in the company of capoeira instructors, pyromaniacal girlfriends, eczema and blueberry pop-tarts.
Though the entire story is told from Oli's point of view, Dunthorne manages to construct full-strength secondary characters that have real impact on narrator and reader alike. Oliver's father reminds him that: "in polite society we change the direction of a conversation by pretending that the thing we want to talk about is in some way linked to the topic at hand." It is these moments of perfectly dry observation that make Submarine a most radiant work of fiction. Fodder for a crossover market (in that it will appeal to both a Young Adult and McSweeney's-age crowd), it is impossible to do justice to by classification.
Just read the damn thing - regrets will be thin on the ground.
Format: Book
Motivation: Cancel all plans
Keywords: Books
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