Synopsis

It Gets Worse is the second instalment of Nicholas Lezard’s rueful, dissolute life. Beginning where his first volume, Bitter Experience Has Taught Me, ended, Nick’s fortunes have not improved. At home in the Hovel, his bachelor existence makes a further descent into chaos, yet the misadventures are faced with sardonic wit, pathos and something like dissident wisdom.

Reviews of this Book

‘This is a hugely entertaining book. Lezard is, as anyone who has enjoyed his writing as a critic knows, a perceptive chronicler of human strengths and weakness, and so he is with himself. His compassionate decency shines through – as he writes, “other people’s troubles start bothering you almost as much as your own” – and buying this for a Christmas present is undoubtedly the most joyful act of charity that you can perform this year.’ —Alexander Larman, Observer

‘Lezard is a magnet for misfortune — his finances, love life and domestic skills are equally disaster-prone, and he shares his book-infested lodgings with a variety of uninvited wildlife. Rueful and funny, this is a book to relish in the comfort of a tidy living room.’ —Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

Praise for Previous Work

‘As a prose stylist, Lezard is the bastard offspring of a previously unsuspected union between P.G. Wodehouse and Samuel Beckett, mixing the eloquent inventiveness of the former with the sudden nihilism of the latter.’ —David Sexton, The Spectator

‘Lezard combines self deprecation with that spirit of irreverence and pride in rule-breaking familiar to those of us who grew up in, or shortly after, the punk years. There are belly laughs on every page.’ —Leyla Sanai, The Independent

‘His prose can include references ranging from Beckett to Buffy, and Santayana to Snoopy, without showing off. He is very funny, turning in memorably comic pieces about the previously mentioned toaster and sofa-moving, and about the hallucinatory after-effects of some herbal virility pills.’ —Nicholas Clee, The Guardian

‘It all makes for high-class comic writing, spun from a desperate dissembling that both reveals and hides itself, all the while tying itself in ever more infuriated knots, railing against a world that threatens to uncover the real man beneath it all. Bitter Experience feels like the beginning of a classic English comic series.’ —Nicholas Blincoe, The Telegraph

‘It is a sort of Bridget Jones for the middle-aged, freshly divorced, tenuously employed and borderline-alcoholic male literary critic.’ —Krissi Murison, The Times

‘Nicholas Lezard is a master of the comic vignette and this book about his post-marital life is sweetened with an almost Wodehousian sense of the preposterous.’ —Jane Shilling, Evening Standard

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Nicholas Lezard

It Gets Worse

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