Riddley Walker

"A hero with Huck Finn's heart and charm, lighting by El Greco and jokes by Punch and Judy.... Riddley Walker is haunting and fiercely imagined and—this matters most—intensely ponderable." —Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review"This is what literature is meant to be." —Anthony Burgess"Russell Hoban has brought off an extraordinary feat of imagination and style.... The conviction and consistency are total. Funny, terrible, haunting and unsettling, this book is a masterpiece." —Anthony Thwaite, Observer"Extraordinary... Suffused with melancholy and wonder, beautifully written, Riddley Walker is a novel that people will be reading for a long, long time." —Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World"Stunning, delicious, designed to prevent the modern reader from becoming stupid." —John Leonard, The New York Times"Highly enjoyable... An intriguing plot... Ferociously inventive." —Walter Clemons, Newsweek"Astounding... Hoban's soaring flight of imagination is that golden rarity, a dazzlingly realized work of genius." —Jane Clapperton, Cosmopolitan"An imaginative intensity that is rare in contemporary fiction.' —Paul Gray, TimeRiddley Walker is a brilliant, unique, completely realized work of fiction. One reads it again and again, discovering new wonders every time through. Set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), Hoban has imagined a humanity regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state—and invented a language to represent it. Riddley is at once the Huck Finn and the Stephen Dedalus of his culture—rebel, change agent, and artist. Read again or for the first time this masterpiece of 20th-century literature with new material by the author. Review "Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' is that rare novel that can be loved by doomster geeks and literary readers alike. It's narrated in a language burnt to its rudiments by nuclear holocaust and revived into new forms by survivors in England who live as hunters, and who believe in a past that's half history, half myth." -- Michael Helm, Nuvo "Off the Shelf", Summer 2008 Product Description A brilliant, unique, and completely realized work of fiction, "Riddley Walker"--first published in 1980--is set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), where humanity has regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state, represented by a language created especially by Hoban for the book. Written in an idiosyncratic yet authentic voice, an ingenious account describes Riddley Walker's attempt to understand the past and the present of a world which continues to exist two thousand years after the ultimate catastrophe occurred On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. Engrossing post apocalyptic book that told entirely in a vividly degenerated post-English that the reader is left to decipher as they find their way through the novel.