A dark, rollicking pirate story for grown-ups, from the mega-bestselling author otherwise known as Lemony Snicket
Daniel Handler is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Why We Broke Up, Adverbs, The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth, and, as Lemony Snicket, Who Could That Be at This Hour? and a sequence of children’s novels collectively entitled A Series of Unfortunate Events. He lives in San Francisco.
Honest and funny, dark and painful, We Are Pirates reads like the
result of a nightmarish mating experiment between Joseph Heller and
Captain Jack Sparrow.? It’s the strangest, most brilliant offering
yet from the mind behind Lemony Snicket
*Neil Gaiman*
Daniel Handler turns whimsy into wisdom and the fantastic into the
great. He is, of course, a genius
*Lorrie Moore*
We Are Pirates will dazzle, disturb and delight you. It might even
do things to you that don’t start with the letter D, like remind
you what it's like to be young, or convince you that Daniel Handler
can do anything
*Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of
Beautiful Ruins*
There is no writer quite like Daniel Handler. Somehow he manages to
work at the intersection of irony and wonderment, whimsy and menace
– a space I’m not sure I knew existed until I read his work
*Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon
Squad*
It’s been a long time since I read a book quite as crazy as We Are
Pirates. It manages to be funny, weird, dark and moving all at
once. It’s a wild and anarchic ride, as gleefully out-of-step with
much literary fiction as a pirate galleon amid a fleet of sailing
dinghies, and all the better for it. I loved it
*Matt Haig, author of The Humans*
I finished it. I devoured it. I loved it! We Are Pirates is
extraordinary. I sat there wondering how something could be so
dispassionate, and yet so heartfelt at the same time. And then, the
next second, it made me laugh out loud. Remarkable story,
remarkable characters, remarkable prose. I’ll carry it in my head
for ever
*Russell T Davies*
A macabre, darkly human portrayal of family dynamics and growing up
in a world running low on adventure … Handler, as Lemony Snicket,
has always been popular with adult readers as well as YAs, and that
situation should prove true of this new novel
*Booklist*
A “pirate story for grownups”, about a teenage girl causing mayhem
in San Francisco bay, from the author more commonly known as Lemony
Snicket
*Guardian Ones to Watch 2015*
Beneath all the trappings of make-believe and fancy dress, there is
a poignant, serious story about a girl’s need to find her true
self, shackled to her desire to escape from the world – and the
irreconcilable, sometimes bloody conflict between those two
yearnings … Although We Are Pirates is as ragged and slapdash as
its crew, its voyage is no less joyful or defiant
*Daily Telegraph*
This, his fifth novel for adults, retains the whimsy, intrigue and
high camp of his children’s fiction … Silly but poignant ****
*Sunday Telegraph*
A weird mish-mash of the realistic and the fantastical, the comic
and the tragic – but it’s by no means a casual one. After you
finish the book, you realise how carefully it’s been put together,
and how successfully it achieves its aim of remind us of the sheer
(and inescapable) oddness of modern life
*Reader’s Digest*
Shaped by a wild imagination … It’s funny and outrageous – a plea
for the possibility of adventure, superbly imagined
*The Times*
A touching and often dark tale of a father and daughter striving
for something more from life. Their quests for happiness and
freedom smack of rebellion and are written with brutal honesty and
the piercing wit of an author on top of his game
*Shortlist*
A madcap, disturbingly funny novel that teeters on the edge of the
surreal, even as it asks us to examine who and what we value
*Observer*
This is grown-up Snicket – its darkness darker, its sadness sadder,
its faith in the ordered moral universe wrung out and left to drip
despondently, like a fed-up faulty tap … Be prepared when entering
his world. He’ll stay with you
*Big Issue Cymru*
A tale that hovers somewhere between realism and fantasy. Full of
sharp (and angry) observations about modern life, We Are Pirates is
strange, dark and subversive
*Financial Times*
Gloriously cut loose from much in the current book market, We Are
Pirates is a pirate adventure for grown-ups set in modern-day San
Francisco … A swashbuckling, wonderfully eccentric message in a
bottle for those seeking a social order beyond the realm of
traditional authority … Hilarious and haunting
*Independent on Sunday*
Displaying typically impudent imagination, Handler choreographs
this quixotic whimsy with a dexterous touch and flashes of wit …
While the novel builds to a thrillingly mounted and surprisingly
emotive climax, the absence of sympathetic characters to root for
also holes it below the waterline and leaves it and its cargo of
rich prose stranded some way from port
*Sunday Times*
Handler has conjured a set of haphazard juxtapositions, featuring
the funny and the creepy, the frantic and the elegiac, the
sparkling and the rotten
*Liz Jensen, Guardian*
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