Vernon God Little - Tapa dura

The terrorist atrocity that flattens skyscrapers or turns a busy nightclub into a crater is typically described by eyewitnesses as "like a film" and by novelists as an event too improbable for fiction. It is some years since Philip Roth wrote in a famous essay about a reality that is "a kind of embarrassment to one's own meagre imagination". It is this reality, the one you couldn't make up if you tried, which only makes sense as an insane film, that is the subject of this utterly original first novel about an American teenager falsely accused of a high school massacre, put on trial by television, and sentenced to death by lethal injection. Funnier than The Simpsons, closer to the knuckle than The Office, this is comic writing of the highest order. Pierre is a very clever and - quite possibly - extremely dangerous man.

Fifteen-year-old Vernon Gregory Little is in trouble. And it has something to do with the recent massacre of 16 students at his high school. Soon the quirky backwater of Martirio, barbecue capital of Texas, is flooded with wannabe CNN hacks keen to lay the blame at Vernon's feet. Eulalio Ledesma, in particular, sniffs out his opportunity to make good at Vernon's expense. As the net tightens and desire for a scapegoat reaches fever-pitch, Vernon decides to leave town for Mexico and a date - or so he hopes - with the divine Taylor Figueroa. Peopled by a cast of freaks, obese law-enforcement officers and cold-blooded chattering housewives, Vernon God Little is a riotous adventure story that cuts a swathe through the heart of contemporary America.