'One of the funniest and truest writers we have. No one understands England better than Meades.' Stephen Fry An inventively nasty, gruesomely comic paean to the sylvan heights of Forest Hill and Upper Norwood, a warped map of the death trade's quotidian strangeness.

"One of the funniest and truest writers we have. No one understands England better than Meades."
STEPHEN FRY

Henry Fowler was twice, long ago, runner-up in the Oil Fuels Guild-sponsored Young Funeral Director of the Year competition. His intense loyalties are to his parents, to his wife and children, to the family firm and the trade it practises, to his native south-east London and to his best friend Curly. But when Henry cuts a lock of his sleeping daughter's hair, the foundations of a world, a family and an identity begin to rock.

"Jonathan Meades has been compared, favourably, to Rabelais and, flatteringly, to Swift. The truth is that he outstrips both in the gaudiness of his imagination...Few works of fiction will surpass its toxicity."
'TLS'

"Jonathan Coe meets Edgar Allen Poe"
'Esquire'

"A brilliant novel...Meades is a genius at provoking horrid laughter."
'Evening Standard'

"By the end I was appalled by the extent of my own admiration for this nastily comic tale. This comedy is not so much black as draped in sackcloth and ashes."
BEL MOONEY, 'The Times'