those rare books that, once picked up, proves very difficult to put down.' The Irish Independent 'There is something fearless in the gaze Sansom turns on banality, and this novel is, in the end, a surprisingly gripping feat of coming to terms with what ordinary life is like.' TLS About the Author Ian Sansom reviews regularly for the Guardian and the London Review of Books. His first book, The Truth About Babies, was published by Granta in 2002, and his second, Ring Road, by Fourth Estate in 2004. Detectives in the English tradition stand either in the shadow of Holmes or of Watson. Holmes: the man superbly capable of his job, perfectly temperamentally suited to it. Watson: a man like ourselves, as baffled as we are, yet somehow (on his own, or with Holmes) able to contribute to the solution. In Israel Armstrong, half Jewish, half Irish, fat, almost unemployable, a good natured blunderer who should never have left the safety of Oxford Brookes, and should never, ever have gone to Northern Ireland, Ian Sansom has created a character who perhaps trumps all of the Doctor Watsons in literature. Perpetually mystified, he makes virtually every other character seem the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, as he wanders around looking for Ballygullable, and for a library-load of books that the astute reader will have located round about chapter three. But not everything is as it seems and, in true bumbling style, Armstrong solves by accident the one crime that nobody could solve,