“Spaid’s debut novel delivers a bizarre entrancing collection of anecdotes about a man who’s inappropriately interested in his neighbors ... Spaid’s prose is strong and smart ... offbeat satire ... a magnetic stream-of-consciousness narrative.” – Kirkus Reviews tireless: is a Kirkus Reviews Recommendation June 14 2013 Harassed? Unloved? Just watching life go by? Take this hilarious ride through the narrator’s painful world and find others who are even worse off than you. Next door you’ll meet Jim and his outrageous stories the unattainable Olga their dysfunctional children – as well as the appalling Rat and his companion Roquefort who’ll work their way into your life as they do with everybody else. In this satire on human behaviour they’re not fair not fair at all. The narrator an unemployed teacher and aspiring writer lives in London. When Jim and Olga move in next door his imagination is fired by the unhappy wife’s nude sunbathing and the pompous husband’s breathtaking tall stories. He recalls his comic victories in the classroom while fantasizing that Britain’s south-east has broken off from the mainland. He remembers his own schooldays and considers the impact of young Miss Bugler. These anecdotes like Jim’s stories highlight the casual cruelties and misunderstandings in human behaviour and the evasive nature of fulfilment. A turning point is Jim’s recollection of a night in India when he hallucinated suffering the taunts of the giant Rat and his close friend Roquefort a miniature cat. Humiliated by publishers’ rejections by the rudeness of Jim’s daughter Daisy and even by his barber the narrator transfers his sense of failure to Rat who enters the narrative in a series of disturbing yet uproarious adventures which merge illusion with the real world. The narrator removes the barber’s head takes revenge on Daisy when she develops an infatuation for him and finally publishes something in contrast to a now unlucky Rat who is arrested almost has a nervous breakdown is refused restaurant service and disappoints as an undergraduate at Oxford where the noisy love-making of Bill and Penny emphasises his loneliness. From the author... tireless: celebrates the creative urge while satirizing the people who create. I wanted to write a book that would keep attention on any page you turned to so the person who looked over your shoulder on the train to see what you were reading would only look away when their station had come. ‘A colon comes in handy here before examples: two dots on top of one another like the cowboys who copulate on Brokeback Mountain on a slope so far away you need binoculars to see them properly.’ ... from the chapter RAT ARRESTED! in tireless: http://grahamspaid.com ...for samples from tireless: http://grahamspaid.blogspot.com ...for new writing
