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An Almost Perfect Christmas
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  • Published: 2 November 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241981368
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176
Categories:

An Almost Perfect Christmas

A hilarious Christmas read from bestselling author of Love, Nina




An ode to the joy and insanity of Christmas from the heir to Sue Townsend

"I vowed from a young age never to cook a turkey and I never have - unless you count turkey mince (which you don't). I've seen the damage turkeys can do and the tyrannical hold they have over otherwise robust, rational people and my mother. My mother is not a foodie. But for as long as I can remember, once a year, she becomes possessed of a profound and desperate need to serve up a perfect roast turkey. Faced with a walk into the village though, she might think 'oh, fuck it' and decide to get a frozen one from Bejams on the 23rd and leave it to defrost in the downstairs toilet for not quite 48 hours."

From dry turkeys to Christmas pudding fires, from the perfect present for teacher to the risks and rewards of re-gifting, Nina Stibbe offers her inimitable wisdom and humour on the most wonderful time of the year.

  • Published: 2 November 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241981368
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176
Categories:

About the author

Nina Stibbe

Nina Stibbe was born in Leicester. She is the author of two works of non-fiction - Love, Nina and An Almost Perfect Christmas - and three previous novels: Man at the Helm, Paradise Lodge, and Reasons to be Cheerful, which is the only novel to have won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Comedy Women in Print Award. Love, Nina won Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was adapted by Nick Hornby into a BBC TV series. Nina Stibbe lives in Cornwall.

Also by Nina Stibbe

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Praise for An Almost Perfect Christmas

All festive life is in these short stories

Red

Anyone who's suffered perennially dry turkey, the dreaded round-robin and having all your beloved's family in the same room at the same time, will laugh and laugh

Saga

Charming

India Knight

I'll return to An Almost Perfect Christmas year after year...it's Stibbe who truly captures that typically English attitude of adhering to traditions while grumbling about them ceaselessly

Stylist

Nina Stibbe is coming on as the new Sue Townsend or Alan Bennett

Evening Standard

Prepare to ignite your Yuletide spirit

Glamour

The author of Love, Nina delves hilariously into the festive season

Elle

These festive essays are the perfect anecdote for anyone who doesn't "do" Christmas

Fabulous Magazine, The Sun

This book is the seasonal garnish we all need. There is no subject upon which Stibbe could not entertain . . . It ends with "Zest: a vital ingredient in many Christmas dishes". But the essential zest, I'd say, is Nina Stibbe herself

Observer

This will have any recipient chuckling out loud

Homes & Antiques

Witty, intimate, beguiling... Ideal for a Christmas stocking

Irish Times