Little Hands Clapping - Hardcover

Quirky and original, and the storytelling is truly virtuoso. A literary treasure. -- LOUIS DE BERNIERES * * [on TIMOLEON VIETA] * * Oh, how we love Dan Rhodes. Reliably odd but fabulous. * * Guardian * * Absolutely flawless comic writing. Original fresh and funny. * * Observer [on GOLD] * * Surely the true best of Granta's Best [Young British Novelists] list. Everybody should go out and buy Timoleon Vieta Come Home ... A story worthy of W.G Sebald, universal in its scope and ambition. -- ROSE TREMAIN * * Daily Telegraph * * Rhodes is that real, rare thing - a natural storyteller. -- PAUL BAILEY * * Sunday Times * * Dan Rhodes's books are gloriously strange. Who but Rhodes would write a laugh-out-loud funny novel . . . Some people won't get it at all - indeed, will be enraged by it - but fans of The League of Gentlemen and Mitchell and Webb will see exactly what he's trying to do and love him for it. * * Waterstone's Books Quarterly * * Suicide museum horror meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez romance, welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Dan Rhodes. -- John O'Connell * * Waterstone's Books Quarterly * * Little Hands Clapping ought to be the book that brings Rhodes out of the 'cult favourite' bracket . . . Indeed, the most moving aspect of the book is not what happens to the characters, but what it does to the reader: reading it is like taking a deep breath into the lungs of your imagination. * * Scotland on Sunday * * Dan Rhodes is a storyteller par excellence, a purveyor of the bleakest, funniest black comedy around, and an author with no obvious peers . . . [Rhodes delivers] a strange, surreal gothic fable laced with humour and pathos, a novel with a heart-warming and all-too-rare humanity at the core of its inventive and more than a little strange plot . . . Combining heady romance, nihilism and despair, human failings, and a fair amount of spider munching, this is a unique, sparkling story. Dan Rhodes is a writer to treasure. -- Doug Johnstone * * List * * The sense that this is a fairy story, with all the implications of a moral message and an investigation of human nature that come with it, runs through the book and is heightened by its title . . . His gentle yet clever telling of the monstrous events at the museum finds humanity in the horror and makes his characters' unpleasant antics seem almost whimsical . . . After reading Rhodes's book, many little hands should be clapping very loudly indeed. -- Alice Fisher * * Observer * * A sublime, brilliant novel . . . Rhodes's most accomplished yet. -- Doug Johnstone * * Scotsman * * Rhodes manages to turn this knockabout plot into an amusing fable about thwarted altruism and good intentions gone askew. It should please cynical idealists and idealistic cynics alike. * * Financial Times * * A brilliant and stylish yarn which entertains from start to finish. * * The Skinny * * It has a gothic front cover that Tim Burton would be proud of. * * Big Issue * * While never losing sight of the monstrousness that ensnares his characters, Rhodes remains gloriously, mordantly funny. * * Independent * * Rhodes's prose is drily understated and, while events steer well clear of the plausible, the whole piece has a fable like credulity. -- Andrzej Lukowski * * Metro * * clever, fun and beautifully written * * The Short Review * * They are clever, fun and beautifully written, but in the end, we don't need to believe the outcomes could be real... Buy the book for some wry laughs and clever stylised observations of human nature in terms of how men and women woo, love and lose each other. * * The Short Review * * Little Hands Clapping is a great book in that that's what you want to say when you've finished it. * * The Truth About Lies * * Hackneyed concepts such as the meeting of eyes on an underground train, are not merely subverted by the hopelessness of their characters, but moving for the delicacy with which they are described . . . This book will not appeal only to Rhodes' numerous current fans, but to pretty much anyone who can stomach a bit of gruesome vulgarity in a love story. -- Oliver Marre * * Spectator * * As heart-warming and gruesome as a fairytale . . . By the end, anything could happen. And it just might. * * Docklands * * Dan Rhodes' fiction is idiosyncratic, a magical realist mixture of the quaint, the sweet and the distinctly unpleasant narrated in an unemphatic, reassuring style. * * Guardian * * The intertwined stories are varied and the descriptions rich. -- Claire Ennis * * Evening Express * * This is a crowded, lively book, full of kooky flights of tangential fancy, arresting descriptions of odd details and engaging characters racked with unusual problems. It is also very gruesome . . . extremely disturbing. -- Toby Clements * * Review Magazine * * Rhodes weaves tangential storylines together with exceptional skill, drawing on contemporary journalism, gothic literature and magical realism. Little Hands Clapping is compulsively readable, ghoulish storytelling - a macabre novel on par with the fiction of Roald Dahl. * * The Age (Melbourne) * * A macabre, brilliant and terrifying novel. Good strong stuff. -- Michael Holroyd * * Guardian * *

A tale of mortifying heartbreak, momentous love, horrifying deaths and delicious apfel kuchen, in which a spider-eating old man and the local doctor form an unlikely alliance, fate unites a heartbroken baker and a euphonium, the most beautiful girl and boy in the village find love, and the town's least effective policeman, with a little help from a dog called Hans, exposes a crime so grotesque that it will shock the nation.