Sprout Mask Replica

Description

The compelling story of a family of fervent God-botherers which may or may not be a family memoir and is certainly full of tall tales. His great-great grandfather died at the Battle of Little Big Horn. He wasn't with Custer though. He was holding a sprout-bake and tent meeting in the field next door and went over to complain about the noise. His great-grandfather (also a sprout farmer and man of the cloth) always wore weighted shoes while in the pulpit, to avoid any embarrassing levitations during moments of extreme rapture. His grandfather (lay precher, large sideburns, taste for sprouts) spoke only in rhyming couplets (to please the ghost of his dead wife) and owned a pig called Belshazzar that dined exclusively upon the aforementioned vegetables and did strange things on the back parlour wall. His father (an elder in the Sacred Order of the Golden Sprout) practised body-modification in an attempt to win a bet with his brother (a monk) that he could shin up the inside of a drainpipe. And there was him. And he was weird. Can this be Robert Rankin's autobiography? He swears that it isn't, but as a self-confessed teller of tall tales, whoever is going to believe him?

Robert Rankin is the author of Web Site Story, Waiting for Godalming, Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls, Snuff Fiction, Apocalypso, The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag, Sprout Mask Replica, Nostradamus Ate My Hamster, A Dog Called Demolition, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived, The Greatest Show Off Earth, Raiders of the Lost Car Park, The Book of Ultimate Truths, the Armageddon quartet (three books), and the Brentford trilogy (five books) which are all published by Corgi Books. Robert Rankin's latest novel, The Fandom of the Operator, is now available as a Doubleday hardback. For more information on Robert Rankin and his books, see his website at www.lostcarpark.com/sproutlore

'Stark raving genius' * The Times * 'He does for England what Spike Milligan does for Ireland. There can be no higher praise' -- John Clute * Mail on Sunday *