As such it acts as a perfect anecdote to the tendency to see unpleasantness as somehow more literary; as one wedding guest says of an attendee on a creative writing course she ran:

Five star nice of course. So why am I not firing off the AWESOME accolade, the OH WOW OMG!!!!! complete with the necessary exclamation marks? The thing is, as a child the world looked huge, intimidatingly so. School looked big. Adults looked big. The future looked big. But I am starting to feel that over time I have retreated into a smaller world. I see people rushing around and I wonder – where are they going to? Who are they meeting? Their lives are so full. I’m trying to remember if my life was ever like that.”Vielen Dank an Frauke Meurer & Torsten Woywod für den Mut zum Gründen des Verlages und dem Publizieren dieser einzigartigen Lektüre. Sally Diamond cannot understand why what she did was so strange. She was only doing what her father told her to do, to put him out with the rubbish when he died. In his radiant first novel, Irish musician Hession (aka Mumblin’ Deaf Ro) takes readers into the quiet, seemingly ordinary world of two unusual men, both in their 30s, both solitary by nature: Leonard, who writes entries for children’s encyclopedias, and Hungry Paul, a substitute postman, who works, when needed, on Mondays. Leonard lived with his mother, who has just died; Hungry Paul, with his parents, a retired economist and his cheerful wife, a primary school teacher, nearly retired herself. Although gossips may disparage an adult still living with parents as indolent, Hession portrays the men with respect and generosity. Hungry Paul “never left home because his family was a happy one, and maybe it’s rarer than it ought to be that a person appreciates such things.” The two appreciate their friendship as well: They play board games together, take walks, and confide in one another. Their friendship is a pact “to resist the vortex of busyness and insensitivity that had engulfed the rest of the world. It was a pact of simplicity, which stood against the forces of competitiveness and noise.” Of the two, Hungry Paul seems the more content, blessed with an inviolable “mental stillness” and “natural clarity” that inure him to troubling thoughts: “He just had no interest in, or capacity for, mental chatter.” Leonard is more inclined to second-guess himself and to conjure problems. He becomes afraid that withdrawing from the world might narrow his perspective, turn him “vinegary,” and make other people seem increasingly “unfathomable and perplexing.” He wants to open himself to experiences but worries that if Hungry Paul is content within his small universe, Leonard’s yearning to break out of his “own palpable milky loneliness” will threaten their friendship. The prospect of change propels the plot, prodding each man to articulate, with surprising self-awareness, the depths of his identity and to realize, as Hungry Paul reflects, that “making big decisions was just as consequential as not making them.” No one is “entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.” It is a story of charm and wit that immerses the reader within the ordinary, everyday lives of our narrators. The titular Leonard works as a ghost writer of children’s encyclopaedias, of which he himself is an avid reader. Paul lives at home with his parents and works every second Monday as a postman. The wants and desires of both men are simple, and they remain gloriously void of external influences while steering well clear of extroverts. The writing is sharp, witty, observant, the humour is wry and I found myself giggling and smiling often.

Before opening this book, I read an online reviewer categorise it as “up lit” (uplifting literature). This terrified me. There’s something odd and doomed about things that try to make you happy in times of chaos: like a man telling you to smile when you’re crying or the quartet playing a waltz as the Titanic goes down. Sobbing over a romance, poring over social critique; these can be cathartic and illuminating. But “up lit”? Though not autobiographical, it is a tribute to the kindness I have experienced all my life and which can sometimes seem absent, largely because it is so often expressed in private.It is also beautifully crafted - I highlighted so many passages in my kindle copy that I struggled to select one or two to include in this review, although as a life insurance actuary I loved this towards the novel's end: It had taken someone with the special insight of Hungry Paul to realise the answer to the problem, strange though it seemed, was to get people to do nothing.”Shortly after the book begins, his beloved mother dies, leaving him feeling somewhat adrift and a touch lonely. He yearns to connect with someone to join him in appreciating the mystery and beauty of the universe. But he doesn’t know how to make friends let alone how to get a girlfriend.