Comfort and Joy

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What to expect

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of India Knight's darkly comic Comfort and Joy. Read with humour and sensitivity by Lucy Brown, the star of the hit show Primeval.

It's December 23rd and Clara Dunphy is running around Oxford Street like a blue-arsed fly trying to buy presents. She wants to make Christmas perfect: it's a lifelong ambition. And a challenging one at the best of times, even without taking her sixteen guests - sorry, "loved ones" - and their varying degrees of social dysfunction into account. Meanwhile, something weird has happened to her marriage, and the ho, ho, ho is thin on the ground.

Why does Christmas have such an emotional hold over us? Why does family stuff hit the peak of its madness on December the 25th? And is it okay to want more than you have, when what you have seems so enviable from the outside?

A blackly funny, tender dissection of the meaning of love - family love, sibling love, children love - Comfort and Joy will make you laugh and cry.

Critics Review

  • Breathless, ­colourful, hilarious and honest; the dialogue is sitcom-snappy and the opening scenes in Oxford Street positively Joycean

    Daily Mail

  • So kindly and funny and affectionate that you could probably warm your hands on it. Miraculously, this is a feel-good story that manages not to be saccharine. There are a great many good jokes here . . . but concealed amid the fun, like silver coins in a Christmas pudding, is a serious theme. This is a book you could safely give to practically anyone. Snap up plenty of copies to hand around under the tree

    Spectator

  • I loved Comfort and Joy, a hilarious, bawdy yet touching portrait of Christmas over three years

    Guardian Books of the Year

  • Fabulous. Laugh-out-loud funny, moving and as cuddly as Santa Claus, this is perfect for snuggling up with over the Christmas holidays

    Cosmopolitan

  • Touching…it will make you laugh, maybe make you cry and keep you reading past bedtime

    Grazia

  • A wickedly funny, painfully honest look at families, festivities and romantic love

    Marie Claire

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