The Book of Dave

When East End cabdriver Dave Rudman's wife takes from him his only son, Dave pens a gripping text-a compilation about everything from the environment, Arabs, and American tourists to sex, Prozac, and cabby lore-that captures all of his frustrations and anxieties about his contemporary world. Dave buries the book in his ex-wife's Hampstead backyard, intending it for his son, Carl, when he comes of age. Five hundred years later, Dave's book is found by the inhabitants of Ham, a primitive archipelago in postapocalyptic London, where it becomes a sacred text of biblical proportions and the template for a new civilization. Only one islander, Symum, remains incredulous. But, after he is imprisoned for heresy, his son Carl must journey through the Forbidden Zone and into the terrifying heart of New London to find the only thing that will reveal the truth once and for all: a second Book of Dave that repudiates the first. The Book of Dave is a profound meditation upon the nature of religion and a caustic satire of contemporary life. Praise for The Book of Dave: "Self seamlessly toggles between the two time periods, giving equal depth to frustrated, sympathetic Dave and to the inhabitants of the post-apocalyptic future."-Entertainment Weekly "A cross between 'Jabberwocky' and A Clockwork Orange...Like Martin Amis, with whom he's often compared, Self marries his verbal acrobatics to social critique...You're left with the intoxication of Self's wordplay and the clarity of his visions."-Los Angeles Times "Self achieves an elaborate vision of vicious superstition and hopeless struggle."-New Yorker [A] phantasmagoria of savageries...The satirist Will Self has upped his ante from Monty Python to Jonathan Swift, and gone straight to brilliant hell.-Harper's Magazine