The Crowd Pleaser

Synopsis

Mike Perry has made a career out of honesty. His stand-up is confessional, his public image carefully candid – but Mike has always been better at performing the truth than living it. When his oldest friend Chris, a comedian of far greater and more troubled genius, dies suddenly, Mike travels back to the Northern town where they grew up. He intends to stay for the funeral and leave. He ends up staying much longer.

Lodging above the shop of Mona, the steadiest of their old schoolfriend group, Mike finds himself drawn back into the past: the four friends – including Natalie, his lifelong crush, now married – who shaped each other through school, university, and the anarchic energy of the London comedy scene in the Noughties. Chris was everything Mike feels he isn’t – wayward, uncompromising, prodigiously original – and in death he proves no less difficult, having left Mike a final message hidden somewhere for him to find. As Mike searches, cryptic and threatening texts begin arriving from an unknown number.

Funny, warm, and quietly devastating, The Crowd Pleaser is a novel about grief and guilt, about the comedy of being alive, and about the particular love between people who have known each other long enough to be entirely honest – almost.

Praise for Previous Work

‘(On Animal Lovers) Hilarious, poignant and stuffed full of brilliant secondary characters. I couldn’t put it down.’ —Daily Mail

‘Animal Lovers reads like a book that its author needed to write … Palk has channelled his experiences into something deeper and more affirming.’ —The Financial Times