Firmin (a first printing)

It has that rare quality of by the end seeming like an archetype for a story that's been around all along (JOHN SELF ASYLUM)a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of human existence (James Pressley Bloomberg.com)I enjoyed Sam Savage's book more than any work of light fiction I've read in 2008 (John Sutherland THE TIMES)Sam Savage has written a great comic allegory, and you can bet movie men are already looking at it with Pixar vision (SAGA)I think both men and women would enjoy this book and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who loves rats or books (THE BOOKBAG)As Firmin discovers when he hops across oceans and abridges centuries, reading multiplies life (Peter Conrad THE OBSERVER)Firmin is an unusual picaresque hero for whom learning.. is an adventure of new discoveries.. it is often funny (Ruth Morse TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT) Firmin is the runt of a litter of rats born in the basement of Pembroke Books, a ramshackle old bookstore run by the equally shambolic owner Norman Shine. Forced to compete for food, Firmin ends up chewing on the books that surround him. Thanks to his unusual diet, he acquires the miraculous ability to read. He subsequently develops an insatiable hunger for literature and a very unratlike sense of the world and his place in it. He is a debonair soul trapped in a rat's body¿ But a literary rat is a lonely rat and, spurned by his own kind, he thinks he recognises a kindred soul in Norman. Firmin seeks solace in the Lovelies of the local burlesque cinema and in his own imagination. But the days of the bookshop and of the close community around it are numbered. The area has been marked out for urban regeneration and soon the faded glory of the bookshop, the low-life bars, loan agencies and pawn shops will face the bulldozers.