Worst. Person. Ever.

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What to expect

A razor-sharp portrait of a morally bankrupt and gleefully wicked modern man, Worst. Person. Ever. is Douglas Coupland's gloriously filthy, side-splittingly funny and unforgettable novel.

Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him.

Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivor-style reality show. Along the way, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, is forced to re-enact the ‘Angry Dance’ from the movie Billy Elliot and finds himself at the centre of a nuclear war. We also meet Raymond's upwardly failing sidekick, Neal, as well as Raymond's ex-wife, Fiona, herself ‘an atomic bomb of pain’.

Even though he really puts the ‘anti’ in anti-hero, you may find Raymond Gunt an oddly likeable character.

Critics Review

  • An outrageous comic riot, delivered as a tear-inducing funny and pitch-black farce … For every laugh here, there’s a haunting, echoing scream in the distance. The plot is unbridled rompIt is hard to describe, out of context, quite how funny Coupland’s novel can be.

    Sunday Times
  • Worst. Person. Ever. is very much a return to form. It had me laughing out loud on the bus to work.

    Irish Times, Books of the Year
  • There are gloriously unquotable remarks and fantastically lurid images on every page. Gunt’s mind is a super-sewer in which it is a pleasure to swim. You can’t help giggling, constantly. Worst. Person. Ever. may be a raging bonfire of inanities but it contains some of Coupland’s finest writing since Shampoo Planet.

    Evening Standard
  • There are some clever plot twists and fine comedy set pieces.

    Scotland on Sunday
  • A comic riot of a novel.

    Sunday Times - Must Reads

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