What is your favourite smell? The Tahitian gardenia on the tropical hillside of Hana Iti in French Polynesia. Sorry, that’s not true. Um, gin and tonic.
What is your favourite word? Glenmorangie.
What is your favourite building? How many buildings do you think I’ve got?
What is your favourite journey? Back from the off-licence.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Abstemiousness.
On what occasions do you lie? Whenever I find sitting too strenuous.
What is your greatest regret? That I am too good at acting to appear in The House of Eliott.
When and where were you happiest? When Osborne, my new chap, said he would stay in Honiton if there was a reasonably good peanut-brittle supplier, and we found out there was.
How do you relax? By pottering in the garden. I also do diggering, prunering and weedering.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life? Less work.
Which talent would you most like to have? To do less work, and not worry about it.
What would your motto be? Something will turn up.
What keeps you awake at night? Nothing. Not even sheds burning down.
How would you like to die? Is that a threat?
How would you like to be remembered? That’s very kind of you. Yes, I’d like that a lot.
Quote of the Month (Sheds) – Osborne Lonsdale
‘I don’t know how I got into sheds, but the funny thing is this. Once you’re in them, it’s very hard to get out again.’
About the Author
LYNNE TRUSS is one of Britain’s best-loved comic writers and is the author of the worldwide bestsellers Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Talk to the Hand. Her most recent book is Get Her Off the Pitch! She reviews for the Sunday Times and writes regularly for radio.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favourite HarperCollins authors.
From the reviews of With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed:
‘This book will become a perennial comic delight … this Truss must never be stopped’
SUE LIMB
‘Searchers after lightness, brightness and wit will find all three in this delightful novel … a plot whose coincidences and misunderstandings outnumber those in a P.G. Wodehouse novel’
MAUREEN OWEN, Daily Mail
‘Sex, violence, murder and psychoanalysis lurk in the garden shed in Lynne Truss’s With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed – a breezy, rude, pleasurable alternative to cutting the grass’
GERALDINE BRENNAN, Observer
By the same author
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed
Making the Cat Laugh: One Woman’s Journal of Single Life on the Margins
Tennyson’s Gift
Going Loco
Tennyson and His Circle
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door)
A Certain Age: Twelve Monologues from the Classic Radio Series
Get Her Off the Pitch: How Sport Took Over My Life
FOR CHILDREN
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference
The Girl’s Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can’t Manage Without Apostrophes!
Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, Every Punctuation Mark Counts!
LYNNE TRUSS
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Over 3 million copies sold worldwide
Anxious about the apostrophe? Confused by the comma? Or just plain stumped by the semi-colon?
Join Lynne Truss, self-confessed punctuation stickler, in this impassioned and hilarious tour through the rules of punctuation. A runaway bestseller, it is both a brilliantly clear guide for the punctuation challenged and enthralling entertainment for the grammar devotee.
‘A punctuation repair kit. Passionate and witty … fresh and funny’
Independent
‘Truss deserves to be piled high with honours’
JOHN HUMPHRYS, Sunday Times
LYNNE TRUSS
Talk to the Hand
The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or six good reasons to stay at home and bolt the door)
This is not a book about manners, nor a book about etiquette. It is a book about rudeness.
Lynne Truss, bestselling author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves and champion of correct punctuation, returns to fight for the cause of politeness. A joyous rant against the everyday rudeness we’ve all become accustomed to, Talk to the Hand brilliantly dissects the incivilities of modern life. Why are other people so crass, selfish and inconsiderate? Whatever happened to ‘please’ and ‘thank you’? Why do we have to put up with so much swearing? And whatever happened to public-spiritedness?
‘A lively and witty broadside against the modern “eff off” society’
Sunday Express
‘Trademark Truss … (very) readable, (very) funny, (very) engaging’
Observer
LYNNE TRUSS
Get Her Off the Pitch!
How Sport Took Over My Life
Get Her Off the Pitch! is the story of one woman’s foray into the very masculine and rather baffling world of sport. Lynne Truss spent four years as an unlikely sports writer for The Times. It was a job that took her around the world (via the most difficult journeys and least glamorous hotels) and introduced her to some of the greatest living sportsmen (and many argumentative men with clipboards).
It is a hilarious, perceptive and at times moving account of those four strange years. It is perfect for those for whom sport is a matter of life and death, for those who have no idea what all the fuss is about – and for everyone in between.
‘Who will want to read this book? Just people like me who are largely indifferent to sport but enjoy literate, amusing, properly punctuated writing about anything’
Daily Mail
‘She can write comedy for Britain’
The Times
LYNNE TRUSS
Making the Cat Laugh
One Woman’s Journal of Single Life on the Margins
A brilliant collection of Lynne Truss’s journalism – recording the life of a metropolitan refugee from coupledom.
For seven years Lynne Truss, in columns for The Listener, The Times and Woman’s Journal, tried to make her cat laugh. Along the way, ‘Margins’, ‘Single Life’ and ‘One Woman’s Journal’ collected a band of devoted fans, yet the cat remained unimpressed. But, under headings such as ‘The Single Woman Considers Going Out but Doesn’t Fancy the Hassle’ and ‘The Single Woman Stays at Home and Goes Quietly Mad’, we discover a writer not only obsessed with cats, but prone to over-reacting generally – to news stories, shopping, passive smoking, Christmas, coupledom, boyfriends, snails, sheds, Andre Agassi, cooking instructions, requests of ‘How’s the novel going?’ and personal remarks of any kind.
‘A small masterpiece of comedy … A continual hoot’
The Times
‘Trenchant writing, invigorating valour, and a shrewdly observant wit’
LYNNE TRUSS
A Certain Age
Twelve Monologues from the Classic Radio Series
A Certain Age collects Lynne Truss’s twelve highly original monologues, about love, romance, friendship and family. Whether writing from the point of view of fathers, daughters, married men, cat lovers or ‘other women’ she is always brilliantly perceptive, sardonic and memorable. All are funny, touching and beautifully observed as one would expect from this bestselling author.
‘Dazzling … sad, funny and, of course, exquisitely written’
Daily Mail
‘Beautifully observed … Truss is simply a huge talent’
Guardian
LYNNE TRUSS
Tennyson’s Gift
It is July 1864 and the Isle of Wight is buzzing w
ith eccentric creative types. A morose Alfred Tennyson is reciting Maud to empty sofas, whilst photographer Julia Margaret Cameron white-washes roses and tries to capture Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) in heroic poses. Into this cauldron of unrequited love and egotism step an acclaimed painter, his sixteen-year-old wife and a father-and-daughter team of phrenologists.
Unexpectedly moving and written with a mischievous sense of humour, Tennyson’s Gift is a triumphantly funny foray into love, literature, eccentricity and beards.
‘Enormously entertaining, a delicious confection’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A rollicking read. It is mischievous, light-hearted and fun’
Literary Review
‘Terrific … witty, surprising … and hugely assured’
Sunday Times
LYNNE TRUSS
Going Loco
A Comedy of Terrors
Struggling with the modern balancing act of personal and work life, successful writer Belinda Johansson decides to employ a cleaner while she gets to work on her dream project: a book about the doppelgänger in gothic fiction. But Belinda’s fascination with the doppelgänger is starting to invade her life for real. Is her Swedish geneticist husband really who he says he is? Is her cleaning lady taking her responsibilities a bit too far? And what do clones, Abba and a performing circus rat named Neville have to do with anything?
‘A classic comic novel, unashamed, exuberant, fiendishly clever, and a joy to read’
Daily Telegraph
‘Chock-full of “characters”, slapstick and mystery … achieves laughs through real inventiveness’
The Times
‘Going Loco is wonderfully underplayed, unpredictable and unexpectedly sinister’
Sunday Express
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith London W6 8JB
Visit our authors’ blog at www.fifthestate.co.uk
Love this book? www.bookarmy.com
This Fourth Estate paperback edition published 2010 1
Published in paperback by Profile Books, 2004
Copyright © Lynne Truss 1994, 2004
Lynne Truss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-00-735528-0
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-43758-0
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