Bloody Awful in Different Ways

Reviews / Votes

A LITTLE TREASURE OF A BOOK. Hilarious but vulnerable, clever but raw, and pure joyous storytelling on every page. You'll come for the laughs, but you'll stay for the love letter, from a grown man to his boy self, promising everything will be all right * Fredrik Backman, author of A Man Called Ove * 'I challenge you not to fall in love with Andrev as he thrashes doggedly through life - perpetually hopeful and inept. This is a small gem of a novel, with an irresistible voice and a teasing sidelong wit * Meg Rosoff, author of How I Live Now * This is a truly special novel. A delight from start to finish. Captures the joy and pain of being a teenager perfectly. I adored Andrev and already miss him * Jennie Godfrey, author of The List of Suspicious Things * Darkly funny ... Distinctive ... Walden's instinct for observation and his ear for prose are flawless. His understated humour is particularly winning ... The writing remains so sharp, so beguiling, so acutely observed -- Rebecca Wait * Guardian * A proven winner ... It tells you things about growing up that you didn't realise were true, not until Walden put them into words ... Comparisons will inevitably be drawn with another Swedish novel, Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove (2012). Similarly perceptive of human behaviour (albeit about an old man rather than a young one) and as tragicomic, that novel went from being Sweden's bestselling book of 2013 to global blockbuster. There's no reason why Bloody Awful in Different Ways can't do the same. Bloody awful? Bloody brilliant, more like * Daily Telegraph * What a book! I laughed, cried, despaired and hoped for this young boy negotiating seven fathers in seven chaotic years, taking us with him for the wild ride. A story that reads this easily with consummate fluidity, pace and comic timing deserves the widest audience possible * Jo Browning Wroe, author of A Terrible Kindness * Walden's story is rich with dark humour and tender coming-of-age moments that make this a brilliant and beguiling page-turner * Daily Express * Darkly funny, and comically tragic. An absolute gem. I loved it * Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground * Walden grips your attention with darkly comic verve, and there's a truly ugly undertow to his portrait of toxic masculinity, rendered all the more shocking by the narrator's partial understanding * Daily Mail * Walden has a distinctive voice and has crafted a wonderfully written page-turner that, despite its often bleak subject matter, made me laugh out loud * Mail on Sunday *