The Sunshine Cruise Company

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What to expect

Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham are turning sixty. They live in a small Dorset town and have been friends since school. On the surface Susan has it all – a lovely house and a long marriage to accountant Barry. Life has not been so kind to Julie, but now, with several failed businesses and bad relationships behind her, she has found stability: living in a council flat and working in an old people’s home.

Then Susan’s world is ripped apart when Barry is found dead in a secret flat – or rather, a sex dungeon. It turns out Barry has been leading a double life as a swinger. He’s run up a fortune in debts and now the bank is going to take Susan’s home.

Until, under the influence of an octogenarian gangster named Nails, the women decide that, rather than let the bank take everything Susan has, they’re going to take the bank. With the help of Nails and the thrill-crazy, wheelchair-bound Ethel they pull off the daring robbery, but soon find that getting away with it is not so easy.

The Sunshine Cruise Company is a sharp satire on friendship, ageing, the English middle classes and the housing bubble from one of Britain's sharpest and funniest writers.

Critics Review

A hearty bloodstained handshake, then, for John Niven’s The Sunshine Cruise Company ... sparky, unfussy writing; a fast-moving plot; and, most notably, an ability to be thoroughly outspoken about matters sexual and scatological whilst retaining a surprising degree of empathy for the human trials of his characters …Engaging, utterly accessible and boundary-bending
Independent
The fun is considerable…a caper…it may well be the funniest thing you’ll read this year.
Independent on Sunday
John Niven manages the trick of being both profane and humane.
Observer - summer reads
Fast-moving, acerbic, occasionally tasteless but never dull, this will delight anyone who thinks old people get a raw deal…A great comic romp with deft touches.
Mail on Sunday
The wild man of literature… [The Sunshine Cruise Company is] Fast and furious and, characteristically, brutal in places.
Independent
[I was] hooked by this tale of rampaging women growing old disgracefully…An enjoyable romp spiced up by the author’s sharp and perceptive eye.
Literary Review
Featuring the greatest female duo since Thelma and Louise, John Niven’s novel is a total gem.
Stylist
This is a bawdy, gaudy, rock ‘n’ roll spree of a book. The first chapter reads like a Radio 4 afternoon play, but we’re soon off and running (or should I say lurching?), burping, boozing, cursing and carousing our way through the high jinks. It’s as filthy as a weekend in Clacton-on-Sea, with the requisite pain and loss hidden just beneath the bedsheets.
Spectator
A rollicking road caper…hugely enjoyable.
Metro
A broad tongue-in-cheek comedy that rattles along.
Sunday Mirror

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