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Toy Fights: A Boyhood (Hardback)

Don Paterson

Exquisitely sharp, deeply humane and brutally hilarious, Toy Fights is a future classic from one of the greatest writers of his generation.

1 in stock

£16.99
Format
Hardback
ISBN
9780571240272
Date Published
19.01.2023

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Summary

Exquisitely sharp, deeply humane and brutally hilarious, Toy Fights is a future classic from one of the greatest writers of his generation.

‘Devastatingly funny.’ Geoff Dyer
‘Thought-provoking, hilarious, sardonic and scarily brilliant’ Scotsman
‘Laugh-out-loud funny’ Herald on Sunday

This is a book about family, money and music but also about schizophrenia, hell, narcissists, debt and the working class, anger, swearing, drugs, books, football, love, origami, the peculiar insanity of Dundee, sugar, religious mania, the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene and, more generally, the lengths we go to not to be bored.

Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1963. He spent his boyhood on a council housing estate. When he wasn’t busy dreading his birthdays, dodging kids who wanted to kill him in a game of Toy Fights, working with his country-and-western singer dad, screwing up in the Boys’ Brigade, obsessing over God, origami, The Osmonds, stamps, sex or Scottish football cards, he was developing a sugar addiction, failing his exams, playing guitar, falling in love, dodging employment and descending into madness. While he didn’t manage to figure out who he was meant to be, the first twenty years of his life – before he took a chance, packed his guitar and boarded a train to London – did, for better or worse, shape who he would become.

Critic Reviews

A tremendously engaging memoir, seasoned with Don Paterson’s customary wit, total recall and love of language. A classic of its kind.

William Boyd

Critic Reviews

Wonderful, aggressively wise and always – especially at its most serious – devastatingly funny.

Geoff Dyer

Critic Reviews

Already compared to Shuggie Bain, Toy Fights is a story of family, the working class, money, and all the things in between that we do to avoid boredom.

GQ

Critic Reviews

Anyone wanting a quiet book should read elsewhere – it will make you laugh aloud.

Observer

Critic Reviews

You’ll be lucky if you find a more thought-provoking, hilarious, sardonic and scarily brilliant self-portrait this year.

Scotsman

Critic Reviews

These 360 pages scorch and crackle with the joy of revenge and revelation … Toy Fights is a memoir in a million, yelping with real-life experience, aghast at the ways human beings manipulate each other and screamingly funny about the absurdity of our pretensions. If a finer memoir is published this year, I’ll eat my own sporran.

Sunday Times

DonPaterson

Don Paterson was born in Dundee, Scotland. His first collection of poetry, Nil Nil (1993) won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. His following collection, God’s Gift to Women (1997) won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Don Paterson’s poetry collection, Landing Light, won the 2001 Whitbread Poetry Award, and also received the…

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DonPaterson

Don Paterson

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