Description

By all appearances, Laurence Passmore is sitting pretty. True, he is almost bald and his nickname in "Tubby", but the TV sitcom he writes keeps the money coming in, he has an exclusive house in Rummridge, a state-of-the-art car, a vigorous sex life with his wife of thirty years, and a platonic mistress to talk shop with. What money can't buy, and his many therapists can't deliver, is contentment. It's not the trouble behind the scenes of his TV show that's bugging him or even the persistent pain in his knee; it's this deeper, nameless unease. Is it a spiritual crisis or just one of the midlife variety?

Tubby's quest for the source of it will lead into an obsession with Kierkegaard, brushes with the police, gossip-column notoriety, and strange beds and bedrooms worldwide.

About the Author

Professor David Lodge is a graduate and Honorary Fellow of University College London. He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987, when he retired to write full-time.He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was Chairman of the Judges for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989, and is the author of numerous works of literary criticism, mainly about the English and American novel, and literary theory. He is also the author ofThe Art of Fiction(1992), a collection of short articles first published in theIndependent on Sunday.David Lodge is a successful playwright and screenwriter, and has adapted both his own work and other writers' novels for television. His novels includeThe Picturegoers(1960),The British Museum is Falling Down(1965),Changing Places(1975),Therapy(1995),Thinks...(2001), and his most recent,Deaf Sentence(2008).He lives in Birmingham.