Patrick deWitt Libri

Picture yourself as a bartender, sipping top-shelf whiskey and watching your customers descend into nightly oblivion. Your heart is broken by the world around you and, leaving the whisky aside, you hatch a devious, unthinkable plan of escape... Award-winning FellSwoop Theatre present Ablutions:a dark, modern drama, adapted from the novel by Man Booker shortlisted author, Patrick deWitt. A grimly funny tale from the sodden depths of the Los Angeles underworld, Ablutions blends a live soundtrack with detailed mime and deWitt’s heart-wrenching humour.

Undermajordomo Minor is the raucous, poignant and spectacularly enjoyable new masterpiece from the author of Man Booker Prize-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, deWitt's dazzlingly original second novel is a darkly funny, offbeat western about a reluctant assassin and his murderous brother.

From the author of the Booker shortlisted Sisters Brothers - a dark, boozy and hilarious tale from the LA underworld.

From the bestselling, Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers, comes a brilliant and boisterous novel that reimagines the folk tale. A love story, an adventure story, a fable without a moral, and an ink-black comedy of manners, Undermajordomo Minor is Patrick deWitt’s long-awaited follow-up to the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Sisters Brothers. Lucien (Lucy) Minor is the resident odd duck in the bucolic hamlet of Bury. Friendless and loveless, young and aimless, Lucy is a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for producing brutish giants. Then Lucy accepts employment assisting the Majordomo of the remote, foreboding Castle Von Aux. While tending to his new post as Undermajordomo, Lucy soon discovers the place harbors many dark secrets, not least of which is the whereabouts of the castle’s master, Baron Von Aux. He also encounters the colorful people of the local village—thieves, madmen, aristocrats, and Klara, a delicate beauty whose love he must compete for with the exceptionally handsome soldier, Adolphus. Thus begins a tale of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, domestic mystery, and cold-blooded murder in which every aspect of human behavior is laid bare for our hero to observe. Undermajordomo Minor is an adventure, a mystery, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behavior, but above all it is a love story and Lucy must be careful, for love is a violent thing.

A comedy/tragedy of manners. The new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers Frances Price - tart widow, possessive mother and Upper East Side force of nature - is in dire straits, beset by scandal. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there's their cat, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts. The curious trio head for the exit, escape pariahdom and land in Paris - a backdrop for self-destruction and economic ruin, and peopled by a number of singular characters: a bashful private investigator, an aimless psychic and Mme. Reynard, aggressive houseguest and friendly American expat. Brimming with pathos and wit, French Exit is a one-of-a-kind tragedy of manners, a riotous send-up of high society and a moving story of mothers and sons

AN INTERNATIONAL No. 1 BESTSELLER Selected as a Washington Post Book of the Summer 'I absolutely adored it' NINA STIBBE From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes a novel about an ordinary man who thought life's surprises were behind him - until a chance encounter changed everything Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior centre that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he's known since retiring, Bob begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed. Behind Bob Comet's straight man facade is the story of an unhappy child's runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian's vocation, and the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses.