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Ponthe Oldenguine
An Entertainment by Andrew Hook
PAPERBACK: $12/£8 rrp: $16.99/£9.99 [ISBN: 978–0–9811597–8–2]
Published: October 8th, 2010
eBOOK: $10 can (about £5.95 / €7) rrp: $14.95 usa (about £9.75 / €11,35) [ISBN: 978–0–9811597–9–9]
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Published: October 8th, 2010
Ponthe Oldenguine is one part fictional biography of a former television impresario who claims he’s been hounded out of media history, and one part biography of the journalist commissioned to write his story. Where the tales merge, there is madness.
If you want a picture of the future, Trunka, imagine a boot stamping on a cake… forever. Imagine just how glorious that would be.
Comic, curious, sometimes downright outrageous, Ponthe Oldenguine is a brain-trip through the forgotten archives of the BBC: Captain Crowface, Radio Cardboard Fox, and The Town of Theberton are but a few of the seminal programmes once confined to the rubbish bin and now exhumed for your reading pleasure. Part 1984, part Python, part slipstream, part realism, the life of Ponthe Oldenguine is an audacious attempt to restore the balance between sanity and insanity; illustrating what a thin line that can be.
So, place your snout in the air, your hands on your tummy, and dance. But read it and believe it at your peril.
Praise for Ponthe Oldenguine:
It's hard to describe much of what happens in the book without spoiling the reading experience, this really is a book that needs to be discovered page by page. As I was reading it my feelings veered between feeling that it was downright outrageous and then all too believable, a somewhat unsettling read but one that's near enough impossible to put down.
— Jenni; Juniper's Jungle
[It is] a wonderfully unique piece of literature… [a] brilliant piece of metafiction…
If you have never picked up a piece of metafiction, this is a great place to start! Andrew Hook tells a wonderful story where the lines of fiction and reality seem to blur together and form something uniquely fantastic. I can’t say enough about how much I enjoyed this brilliant piece. 5/5— Sarah L. Covert; She Never Slept
Despite its brevity this is a book fizzing with ideas. While so much of it, at least superficially, seems preposterous, beneath the surface serious commentary is being made about the banality of modern entertainment and life itself…
[Andrew] Hook doesn’t set a foot wrong with the writing, his voice charming the reader so that we accept the audacity of his invention, the way in which it continually fools not only us but also itself. It is his best book yet, and I loved it.— Peter Tennant, Black Static
Ponthe Oldenguine is both utterly confusing and utterly absorbing, and there is no way to convey the experience, it simply must be read. … [Andrew Hook] sets up the conventions of truth, narrative and fiction, then rubs them raw at the edges so they begin to bleed into one another.
— Marcy Koopmans
A Word from the Publisher:
When it comes to writing fiction, Andrew Hook is a sneaky bastard. He takes his reader gently by the hand, and leads them down a path until they’re in a pleasant, lawned area with a bench. He sits them down, hands them a nice cup of tea, has a quiet conversation about various things that don’t seem particularly connected to each other, and then asks permission to place a blindfold over the reader’s eyes. This odd request granted, he does so. At which point one realizes that what he actually did was remove a blindfold, because everything that you saw until then was fiction, and one is actually sitting with cup of exceedingly fine coffee in the hand, and are surrounded by wonderful flora and fauna in the middle of a country field somewhere in the middle of the New Hebrides. This sudden change of awareness is surprising, but not unpleasant.
That’s what his writing is like: full of surprises, always rewarding, always exceedingly seamless in its use of technique.
He’s good; so very, very good.
Praise for Mr. Hook:
Andrew Hook is a wonderfully original writer.
— Graham Joyce (author of The Facts of Life)
Sharp, quirky, sceptical, and often very funny.
— Joel Lane
Refreshingly original, uncompromisingly provocative, and daringly intelligent.
— The Future Fire
His stories range from the darkly apocalyptic to the hopefully visionary, some brilliant and none less than satisfactory...
— The Harrow
[Andrew Hook's writing] is 'something else'.
— Sarah Pinborough