Book of the week: The Young H.G. Wells by Claire Tomalin

In 2017, Dan Rhodes “severed all ties” with his long-standing publisher, Canongate, following a row over missing royalties, said David Sexton in The Sunday Times. His new novel is an act of revenge, targeting the “whole books business”.

In the village of Big Bottom, a “preposterous literary festival” is being held – at which arrives Wilberforce Selfram, a “tall, cadaverous writer” known for using absurdly long words and for pronouncing everything as “symptomatic of a broad cultural malaise”. Fun is poked at various other literary eminences: J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, the festival director Peter Florence. “The effect is just hilarious”: I read this novel in one sitting, “laughing like a banshee”.

It didn’t have that effect on me, said Adam Roberts in The Guardian. The satire feels very outdated, and the overwhelming focus on the Will Self character “unbalances the whole”.

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Yes, it’s cartoonish and rather uneven, said Rosemary Goring in the Scottish Herald. But it’s an “enjoyable romp” – one that “nails many pretensions, not least the literati’s overblown sense of self-importance”.

Lightning 384pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

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