The Ship of Fools - Tapa dura

The only way to describe this remarkable book is as a modern day Canterbury Tales. The ship goes nowhere very much, but the people aboard are truly strange and unusual: the penitent drunkard, the drinking woman, a monk, a prudish nun, a glutton and so on. It is bawdy, entertaining and full of surprises. Those aboard tell tales to ward off disaster and boredom, and the whole thing is a coat of very many colours; at times wonderfully funny and outrageous. As the General Prologue says, "These stationary travellers, pilgrims without a destination, are simply passing the time". A first novel by an author aged only 25, and it has already been acknowledged as something special by a good number of booksellers, according to the proof copy.

The characters on the purgatorial "Ship of Fools" - a ship that's going nowhere very fast - bicker and struggle for attention: telling tales that bounce off one another to form a compendium of interrelated stories, running from lyrical romance to satire, by way of fairy-tale and black comedy: Canterbury Tales for the millennium.