Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
This Is Your Life - A Novel - cover

Sorry, the publisher does not allow users to read this book from the country from which you are connecting.

This Is Your Life - A Novel

John O'Farrell

Publisher: Grove Press

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

A hugely entertaining novel about the art of stand up comedy, This is Your Life was a runaway bestseller in England. O'Farrell's hero, Jimmy Conway, starts out the novel at the London Palladium. He is about to perform his stand up comedy routine in front of two thousand invited guests and millions more watching the event live on TV. He steps out blinking into the spotlights and waits for the applause to die down. He tries to appear confident but he can't help wondering whether he should have shared his little secret with someone by now. Jimmy has never performed any stand up before - ever.Conway, a nondescript thirtysomething with a long-faded dream of telling jokes in public, starts the proceedings at the lowest point in his life - teaching school, spending his evenings with a old and grizzled collection of barroom bores (including his ex-girlfriend Nancy) and generally feeling miserable over never having gotten his one lucky break.Things take a turn for the better when a local comedy legend, Billy Scrivens, with whom Conway has exchanged a fragment or two of small-talk while out running, drops down dead. Interviewed on television, where he is plausibly represented as the deceased's jogging companion, Jimmy suddenly discovers a tiny chink in the door of the closely guarded gateway to fame and celebrity. After snatching a ticket to Billy's funeral (paid for by the UK equivalent of People Magazine, and awash with the rich and famous) he convinces a gullible journalist that he is the latest underground comedy sensation, a performer so principled that he shuns TV and restricts himself to unscheduled appearances at out-of-the-way clubs. A stack of forged reviews from a phantom American tour does the rest. Courtesy of a rave profile in a national newspaper, his career takes off.The subsequent rollercoaster ride whisks him all the way from a best new stand-up comedy award (where his acceptance speech loss of nerve - "Look, there's been a terrible mistake" - is taken as a riotous gag) to a dullard contribution to a nationally syndicated television show, and even a lucrative ad campaign. Success, inevitably, has its downside: the girls are too eager even for sex-starved Jimmy, and the pub regulars are over-awed by his sudden success.Which all leads to Jimmy's big night at the Palladium, an ingenious finish where the carpet is pulled from beneath Jimmy's feet, which is credit to O'Farrell's resourcefulness, and his relish of the comic twist and detour.
Available since: 12/01/2007.

Other books that might interest you

  • The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories - cover

    The Girl Who Cried Diamonds &...

    Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

    • 0
    • 7
    • 0
    “Bridging tenderness and violence, and brimming with danger and magic, The Girl Who Cried Diamonds will leave you breathless.” — Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis
    		 
    “In these 14 hard-edged and unapologetic stories, debut author Garcia tackles topics ranging from human trafficking and drug abuse to eating disorders and middle-age angst, and in no-frills prose, carves out bizarre and palpable realities, breathing strange life into a horde of depressed, deprived, and abused characters.” — Publishers Weekly
    		 
    The boundaries between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative, are shattered in this remarkable debut collection for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, André Alexis, and Angélique Lalonde 
    A girl born in a small, unnamed pueblo is blessed—or cursed—with the ability to produce valuable gems from her bodily fluids. A tired wife and mother escapes the confines of her oppressive life and body by shapeshifting into a cloud. A girl reckons with the death of her father and her changing familial dynamics while slowly, mysteriously losing her physical senses.
    		 
    Infused with keen insight and presented in startling prose, the stories in this dark, magnetic collection by newcomer Rebecca Hirsch Garcia invite the reader into an uncanny world out of step with reality while exploring the personal and interpersonal in a way that is undeniably, distinctly human.
    Show book
  • Easy to be a God - cover

    Easy to be a God

    Robert J. Szmidt, Robert Szmidt

    • 0
    • 2
    • 0
    As humanity colonizes outer space, they encounter a terrifying alien threat in this military sci-fi thriller. In the twenty-fourth century, and human civilization has made a great leap forward, colonizing over a thousand planets and exploring thousands more. But after surviving a bloody civil war, they now face mysterious new threats.  In the Xan-4 System, scientists and Federation soldiers observe two alien races from an orbital station. Sergeant Henryan Swiecki must identify a group of people who—against procedures—are trying to save one of the races. At stake is not only the survival of the Warriors of the Bone, but also Henryan’s life.  Meanwhile, in the distant New Rouen System, a recycling ship known as the Nomad finds a millennia-old shipwreck while clearing the fields of long-forgotten space battles. The derelict’s advanced technology is impressive...but the being found onboard could shake the very foundation of human civilization . . .
    Show book
  • Running Away to Love - cover

    Running Away to Love

    Barbara Cartland

    • 1
    • 7
    • 0
    For beautiful young Ivana her stepfather Keith Waring is no replacement for her much-missed father, the Honourable Hugo Sherard, who was killed in Spain fighting against Napoleon Bonaparte.
     
    Her stepfather is a spendthrift and he has gambled away virtually everything the family owns.
     
    Ivana’s hatred for her stepfather is doubled when, to her utter horror, she overhears him offering her as a ‘kept woman’ to the equally despised Lord Hanford for over five thousand pounds!
     
    Ivana runs away with her old Nanny acting as her chaperone and companion and applies for work through a Domestic Agency, where she is invited to apply for a post using her flawless Parisian French for the Earl of Lorimer, who is working in the War Office.
     
    Expecting a man to apply for the post, the imperious but handsome Earl is at first sceptical, but on realising that he knew her father, he soon warms to her, saying that he has a ‘difficult and dangerous mission for her!’
     
    Ivana is to become a spy, working undercover against Napoleon’s secret agents. And so her perilous adventures begin.
     
    Very soon she loses her heart – and at every turn she risks losing her life.
     
    But the worst danger of all comes not from the wartime enemy but from the evil Lord Hanford who is still determined to possess her as he has already paid for her.
    Show book
  • A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond - A Novel - cover

    A History of the...

    Percival Everett, James Kincaid

    • 1
    • 2
    • 0
    “A truly funny sendup of the corrupt politics of academe, the publishing industry and politics, as well as a subtle but biting critique of racial ideology.” —Publishers Weekly 
     
    This “hilarious high-concept satire” (Publishers Weekly), by the PEN/Faulkner finalist and acclaimed author of Telephone and Erasure, is a fictitious and satirical chronicle of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond’s desire to pen a history of African-Americans—his and his aides’ belief being that he has done as much, or more, than any American to shape that history. An epistolary novel, The History follows the letters of loose cannon Congressional office workers, insane interns at a large New York publishing house and disturbed publishing executives, along with homicidal rival editors, kindly family friends, and an aspiring author named Septic. Strom Thurmond appears charming and open, mad and sure of his place in American history. 
     
    “Outrageously funny . . . it could become a cult classic.” —Library Journal 
     
    “I think Percival Everett is a genius. I’ve been a fan since his first novel . . . He’s a brilliant writer and so damn smart I envy him.” —Terry McMillan, New York Times-bestselling author of It’s Not All Downhill from Here 
     
    “God bless Percival Everett, whose dozens of idiosyncratic books demonstrate a majestic indifference to literary trends, the market or his critics.”?The Wall Street Journal
    Show book
  • Warned by a Ghost - cover

    Warned by a Ghost

    Barbara Cartland

    • 0
    • 6
    • 0
    The lovely young orphan Sedela Craven is very excited to hear that the Marquis of Windlesham is returning home from active service in the Duke of Wellington’s Army in France at the end of the long war against Napoleon Bonaparte.
     
    He, however, lingers on in London with his beautiful lover Lady Esther Hasting, an exquisite yet unscrupulous woman who is unfaithful to him while striving to ensnare him into marriage for his riches and his celebrated title.
     
    Informed of this by her Nanny, Sedela dresses up as the Windles’s family ghost, Lady Constance, who appears as a warning whenever the family is in danger.
     
    Entering the Marquis’s bedroom at midnight through a secret passage she warns him that he is in grave peril from a woman who is unfaithful to him with a man he trusts as his friend.
     
    To his fury the Marquis soon discovers that the ‘ghost’ spoke the truth when he catches Esther in bed with his friend.
     
    It is only back at his estate preparing with Sedela for a lavish party for his family and friends that he begins to realise what his heart truly desires and it is Sedela.
     
    But it seems that it is too late, for she has been kidnapped and faces death at the forked tongue of a deadly cobra.
     
    The only hope is that the Marquis can rescue her in time to save her life and their love!
    Show book
  • The Poison Belt - cover

    The Poison Belt

    Arthur Conan Doyle

    • 1
    • 3
    • 0
    The team of explorers from The Lost World reunites to face the end of the world in this adventure by the creator of Sherlock Holmes.Prof. George Challenger has made a troubling discovery: The Earth is about to pass through a belt of poisonous gas. He quickly summons his three friends—Professors Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and Edward Malone—to his home in Sussex with a request to bring tanks of oxygen. Once the men arrive, Professor Challenger leads them and his wife to a sealed room where they can wait out the crisis and observe the chaos outside. But when the poisonous cloud finally dissipates, there is no telling what they will find . . .
    Show book