The Art of Failing: Notes from the Underdog - Softcover

I’ve invented a new pastime. I call it Hedgerow Russian Roulette. It involves randomly eating fruits and berries I find in bushes along the side streets of West Hampstead. My reasoning is that I’d be bloody unlucky to find any single berry deadly enough to kill me. It’s not really the sort of game I’d want to play with the kids, but it makes my solitary perambulations so much more entertaining. And the beauty of wondering if that small purple berry will dissolve your liver is that it takes your mind off those deeper issues – deeper even than your liver. The imponderables. But now it suddenly strikes me as odd that we call them the imponderables, when these are precisely the things you spend your life pondering.

Stumble with Anthony McGowan from minor embarrassment to small-scale catastrophe to improbable fiasco. Cringe at one man’s idiosyncratic attempts to navigate the quotidian challenges of married life. Discover just how many ways it’s possible to flop, amidst the glory and desperation of everyday existence.
For fans of Nick Hornby, THE ART OF FAILING is a love poem to holed socks, unsatisfactory packed lunches, athlete’s foot powder, the eccentrics of the British Library, Kierkegaard, Morrissey and the rainy streets of West Hampstead, where an unlucky average man finds himself at sea.