Conville & Walsh
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The Amateurs
- Author: John Niven
- Category: Fiction Commercial General / Other
- Publisher: Heinemann (UK) / HarperCollins (US)
- Pub date: 2 April 2009
- Length: 384 pages
About The Amateurs
Praise for KILL YOUR FRIENDS:
To call Kill Your Friends a satire on the music industry is a wicked understatement. It is an all-out assault, a withering, scabrous and often repulsive attack on every part of the filthy machine… Stelfox is a creation of unparalleled awfulness
– Jonathan Gibbs, INDEPENDENT
This book is fantastically funny. The humour isn’t so much dark as dismally black
– Michael Hodges, TIME OUT
Brilliant. It made me ill with laughter. The filthiest, blackest, most shocking, most hilarious debut novel I’ve read in years
– India Knight
Brilliant satire… It hits all the right notes
– Henry Sutton, DAILY MIRROR
[An] hysterical debut novel… this is truly an account of a lost era, a brilliant depiction of the last, decadent blow-out
– Matt Thorne, INDEPENDENT
It exposes a world that seethes alongside us and in which we all collude but whose nasty little machinery is rarely glimpsed. The novel is furiously, filthily funny, and I imagine, tragically true
– Niall Griffiths
Set in the town of Ardgirvan, on the west coast of Scotland, THE AMATEURS tells the story of two brothers, Gary and Lee Irvine: Gary is one of Scotland’s worst amateur golfers, Lee is one of its worst amateur gangsters, who recently conned himself in a botched drug deal.
Gary’s scheming wife Pauline is embroiled in an affair with local carpet baron and self-made millionaire Findlay Masterson, but he won’t leave his wife because he fears a ruinously expensive divorce. Meanwhile Lee is broke and his life is in danger from the Campbells – Ardgirvan’s most feared crime dynasty – because of his botched drug deal.
Then Gary is smashed on the head by a golf ball and sent into a coma. He wakes up to discover that (in addition to having mild Tourette’s and something called Kluver Bucy Syndrome – a rare neurological condition characterised by near-constant priapic behaviour) he can now play golf like he never thought possible. He qualifies for the Open: he’s going to play against the greatest golfers in the world (including his hero, the world no 1 Calvin Linklater) in the
oldest, most prestigious tournament in the sport.
Meanwhile Pauline and Masterson hit upon a plan to minimise his divorce settlement: they’ll have his wife killed. The Campbells offer Lee a high-paying job that seems like the answer to all his problems: he’s going to kill her. Everything points toward an exciting climax to the 2009 British Open Championship…
About the Author
John Niven spent a number of years working as an A&R manager. His first book, MUSIC FROM BIG PINK, a factional novella set in the world around Bob Dylan and the Band in Woodstock in the late 1960s, was critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic on publication in 2007. Film rights to the book were acquired by Stephen Butterworth. John now writes screenplays and is currently working on a new novel.