When their parents split up nine-year-old Lizzie Vogel, her sister and brother move with their mother to a slightly hostile village in the English countryside.
Nina Stibbe was born in Leicester. She is the author of two works of non-fiction - Love, Nina and An Almost Perfect Christmas - and three previous novels- Man at the Helm, Paradise Lodge, and Reasons to be Cheerful, which is the only novel to have won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Comedy Women in Print Award. Love, Nina won Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was adapted by Nick Hornby into a BBC TV series. Nina Stibbe lives in Cornwall.
I can't remember a book that made me laugh more . . . Man at the
Helm is a winner - it even trumps Love, Nina
*Observer*
A wicked anatomising of a dysfunctional family . . . Buoyantly
comic: farcical yet tender, rude with a forgiving sweetness
*Spectator*
Read it and be charmed. Just the right mixture of childhood
innocence and incredulity for the necessary deadpan delivery of
Stibbe's particular brand of comedy
*Independent*
All hail a book that's funny!
*Barbara Trapido*
[A] joyous read, full of wit and charm . . . I am already longing
for Nina Stibbe's next book
*Express*
A beguilingly comic blend of naivety and precociousness
*Sunday Times*
Within a few pages I was completely caught up in the lives of
Lizzie and her family . . . I couldn't have loved it more
*Lisa Jewell*
Fantastic. Comical, moving and brilliantly evocative of British
childhood
*Glamour*
This book is very, very funny. Stibbe has a fine eye for absurdity,
and her writing has an unforced charm. [And] there is real darkness
here, which makes the humour shimmer all the more
*Independent on Sunday*
Lizzie's voice is convincingly childlike but also confidently witty
. . . What is most moving here - and what makes the book most
similar to Love, Nina - is its celebration of the happiness
possible within the family. Stibbe's feat is to remain
unsentimentally barbed while subtly and triumphantly demonstrating
the value of the kind of understated love found within the
strangest and least obviously functional families
*Telegraph*
Fans of Love, Nina will not be disappointed. Amusing, the writing
is never less than accomplished
*Daily Mail*
This densely populated coming-of-age story (for both mother and
children) has retained and even expanded on Stibbe's signature
antic charm ... The appeal of Stibbe's novel lies less in plotting
than in the way she shades a sequence of comic vignettes with
seriously sad undertones. It's not too much of a stretch to
conclude that Man at the Helm, with its jauntily matter-of-fact
social satire, wouldn't be out of place on the same shelf as Cold
Comfort Farm and I Capture the Castle
*New York Times*
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