Hoi Polloi - Tapa blanda

'I read the first sentence then pushed the day's work aside and sat down to read it all... I haven't come across such a lively and gripping memoir for a long time. Craig Sherborne has the knack of reproducing the soundtrack of childhood - that chorus of half-truths and received opinion that's always at our backs as we grow up'
HILARY MANTEL

'A scalding memoir, funny, fast-moving, shot through with a fierce pathos'
HELEN GARNER

'Mordantly true to life, Muck is one of the most interesting autobiographies I've read'
J.M. COETZEE

'Riveting... Sherborne never bottles out, never falters... Moral courage has propelled this book to the page. Its execution is sublime'
SCOTSMAN

'Excellent... It disturbs me to admit that Sherborne goes deeper than the rest of us into the territory of impressionable immaturity. He writes beautifully, especially when the material is not beautiful at all. He can make the cruel truth poetic'
CLIVE JAMES

'A lyrical, candid memoir... Sherborne's parents are reanimated as tragi-comic grotesques, irresistibly awful, touchingly ludicrous, mordantly sensitive and painfully funny'
THE TIMES

'Sherborne has an extraordinary eye for the damage, trivial and profound, that humans inflict on one another... He has a genius for telling detail'
LITERARY REVIEW

'Sherborne has recreated the child's-eye view masterfully, but just when you think he is making his parents - particularly his mother - a laughing-stock, he turns it back on himself, or conjures a passage of quiet, redemptive beauty'
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

'A work of searing originality and part of an ongoing masterpiece'
THE MONTHLY

'Craig Sherborne's daring, innovative prose is as exhilarating as his disciplined mastery of it is humbling... It enlivens us to the comedy, the pathos, the dignity and the pain of life, as his characters live it'
RAYMOND GAITA author of ROMULUS, MY FATHER

--*

Hoi Polloi recounts a childhood spent on race-tracks and in bars, as the author's parents struggle to climb the social ladder. Acclaimed as an 'instant classic' on first publication, and written with extraordinary sympathy and verve, it is a book that finds fresh and hilarious things to say about growing up.