PenguinReaders' Group
 

Editors' Choice

By Simon Prosser, Publishing Director, Hamish Hamilton & Penguin Books

Submarine

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne

I'm delighted to introduce you to the freshest new voice I've come across in a long while - Joe Dunthorne, author of the fantastic debut novel Submarine, narrated by the equally fresh-voiced Oliver Tate, age 15. Oliver is trying to lose his virginity before his 16th birthday, to his apparently sassy girlfriend Jordana,who makes him write a diary for her to read, describing how great she is . Meanwhile he is convinced that his dad is depressed and his mother having an affair with a "hippy-looking twonk" who is giving her surfing lessons. He is sort of right but also sort of wrong, as he is about many things, and like much of the great comedy of the book, the laughs come from our awareness of the gap between what Oliver thinks he knows and what is actually happening. He may spend a lot of time looking stuff up on the internet, but that doesn't mean he really understands how the world works. So he spies on his parents, monitoring the dimmer switch in their bedroom ("I know when they have been at it because the next morning the dial will be set to half way"), negotiates the pitfalls of adolescence in his own semi-disastrous ways -- and by the end of the book achieves a real knowledge of the world which feels both genuine and deserved. I hope you will enjoy this hilarious and moving growing-up story as much I did.

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