A Shed of One’s Own by Marcus Berkmann
| Press reviews | Buy the book | Have your say |
Blurb: For many men, middle age arrives too fast and without due warning. One day you are young, free and single; the next you are bald, fat and washed-up, with weird tendrils of hair growing out of your ears. None of it seems fair. With age should come dignity and respect, but instead everyone makes tired jokes about buying a motorbike. Marcus Berkmann isn’t having it. Having marked his fiftieth birthday by hiding under the duvet for six weeks, the author of the cricket classics Rain Men and Zimmer Men is now determined to find some light in the all-consuming darkness. Musing over birth, death and all the messy stuff in between, he concludes that however dreadful you look in the mirror today, it will be much worse in ten years’ time. His brutally candid despatch from the frontline is not for the faint-hearted, which is to say anyone under thirty-five.
(Little, Brown, 2012,)
Mark Wilson, The Independent on Sunday
“A Shed of One’s Own is warm, funny and wise, the antidote to Jeremy Clarkson, the Daily Mail, Grumpy Old Men and the other tools of the rage industry that stoke anger and pomposity in the middle-aged. Their solution is to consume more! Get a facelift! Drive faster! Take a mistress! Write an angry letter! Berkmann’s is quietness, a glass of wine, accepting that you’re not young any more – which is a good thing, because young people are boring. A sort of “Zen and the Art of Mid-life Management”.”
Matt Rudd, The Sunday Times
“Berkmann is a fine observer (and perhaps exaggerator) of his own decline. He says what other men would rather not think about, let alone discuss. And while you could (just about) sit through One Foot in the Grave because it’s a caricature, this is more of a challenge because it isn’t. It’s real, very real, a book-long reminder of our own mortality. The chapter on marriage (the gist of which is “less Happy Ever After, more This Will Do”) is unremittingly bleak.”
22/01/2012
The Evening Standard
David Sexton
“… he treats all the familiar humiliations, collapses and subterfuges of late middle age in a ruefully humorous style, sometimes actually funny.”
12/01/2012
Buy the book
Amazon | Foyles | Hive | Waterstones
[AMAZONPRODUCT=1847677940]
OMNISCORE:
