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Flake

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Much of the humor is found in how people are clearly trying to find a way to break the boredom in this small town: Howard’s sole friend, Jasper, has loads of obscure interests, and as head of the Dobbiston Mountain Rescue Service, is doing his utmost to undo the local peak getting recategorized as a hill. For example, he spent six months in a French prison for trying to convert continental road signs from metric to imperial then painting his results on their signposts. Irony, too, is often a fundamental element of the ‘obligatory edgy’, frequently supplied by the visual austerity of bleak urban (and suburban) landscapes. Dooley has always been a subtle visual storyteller, the inherent sophistication in his use of the form easier to miss for his prioritisation of craft over ostentation.

Matthew Dooley has won the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with his graphic novel Flake (Jonathan Cape). When a book opens with a man standing on top of an ice cream van slowly being submerged into the sea, the man seemingly accepting his fate, you're probably not expecting a book that is so absolutely brimming with the warmth and humour that this book absolutely was. Flake tells the story of two rival ice-cream men: Howard, who is meek and happiest hiding in his van doing the crossword; and Tony Augustus – Howard’s half-brother, as it happens – who is intent on building an empire across the region. The absurdist slice-of-life humour of those collections where the incongruous is embedded into the everyday gives them a very distinctive flavour.Just as memorable are the flashbacks of his childhood, which spoke volumes and conveyed so much emotion with sparse text. So, in the months that followed, I took the plunge and went part-time in my day job to dedicate more time to comics. Tony was born of one of the Families, but not into it, and this has given him quite the chip on his fishy shoulder. Described by The Observer as a meld of Alan Bennett and graphic novelist Chris Ware, Flake combines clever detail, warm characters and a good handful of puns.

Since 2014, the guiding light of So Many Damn Books has been to feature books that were good to read, drinks that are nice to drink, and people who are interesting to talk to. Past winners include Helen Fielding (2017), Terry Pratchett (2012) and Howard Jacobson, who took home the inaugural prize in 2000 for The Mighty Waltzer and another in 2013 with Zoo Time. is to attend funerals, not to mourn the deceased, but to gossip about them, while rating each occasion on score cards according to turnout, eulogy and music. Author guests, special drinks, and more book recs than you can shake a stick at -- what more could you need?

Set in an unassuming town in the North West of England, we get pulled into small town Lancashire and I have to say Dooley has packed in some delightful touches that really give us a flavour for this fictitious but identifiable place. But highlighting the irony suggests a cool affective charge, which is at odds with the warmth and playfulness of the novel, which remains fond rather than evaluative or judgemental. The supporting characters were just lovely, so humourous but with a real bond across them, and I thought this book brought Lancashire to life in such a wonderfully vivid way. It’s an affectionate and very funny portrait of Howard, an ice cream man who rather half-heartedly mans the same patch as his father before him, as he struggles with his domineering half-brother, Tony, a rival seller.

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