One Fat Englishman
About this audiobook
The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat—not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self.
In America, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obliging suburban housewives, aspiring Jewish novelists who as good as clean his clock, stray deer, bad cigars, children who beat him at Scrabble, and America itself, while making ever-more desperate and humiliating overtures to Helen, a Scandinavian ice queen. If only Roger would dare to show some real feeling of his own.
This comic masterpiece—about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s and a final scion of a disintegrating Old World empire encountering its upstart New World offspring—is one of Kingsley Amis’s greatest and most caustic performances.
About the author
Kingsley (William) Amis, novelist, poet, and critic, took his MA at Oxford and was a lecturer in English at Swansea and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. A satirist and debunker of note, he is best known for such social comedies as his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), but also saw science fiction as an ideal medium for satirical and sociological extrapolation. Amis’ controversial artistic evolution from supposed radical to national institution was neatly summed up by his receipt of a knighthood in 1990.
Leighton Pugh trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art after studying modern languages at Queen’s College, Oxford. He has narrated audiobooks for Penguin, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Random House, Hachette, and Quercus. His radio work includes the plays Murder by the Book and Scenes from Provincial Life for BBC Radio 4 and the voice of Heinrich von Kleist in the BBC Radio 3 documentary The Tragical Adventure of Heinrich von Kleist. From 2010–2011 he was in four productions at the National Theatre, including The Habit of Art and A Woman Killed with Kindness.
