Ginger, You're Barmy
David Lodge
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099554134
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $29.99

Ginger, You're Barmy

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A funny, shocking novel about the trials and traumas of British post-war National Service.

When it isn't prison, it's hell.

Or at least that's the heartfelt belief of conscripts Jonathan Browne and Mike 'Ginger' Brady. For this is the British Army in the days of National Service, a grimy deposit of post-war gloom. An endless round of kit layout, square-bashing, shepherd's pie 'made with real shepherds' and drills is relieved only by the occasional lecture on firearms or V.D. The reckless, impulsive Mike and the more pragmatic Jonathan adopt radically different attitudes to survive this two-year confiscation of their freedom, with dramatic consequences
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099554134
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

David Lodge

David Lodge (CBE)’s novels include Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work (shortlisted for the Booker) and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages.

He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

portrait photo of David Lodge

Also by David Lodge

Varying Degrees of Success
Writer's Luck
The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up and Other Stories
The Picturegoers
Quite A Good Time to be Born
Lives in Writing
The Art of Fiction
See all

Praise for Ginger, You're Barmy

Vivid, funny, and with a compassion made all the more moving by the harshness of its military setting

Daily Telegraph

Has the ring of complete authenticity...the mingling of horror and farce are all brilliantly evoked

A.N. Wilson, Spectator

Engaging slapstick...the Woody Allen of contemporary English fiction

Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph

The novel is stuffed with a dawning sense of class hatred, a sudden awareness that 'an archaic world of privilege' exists even in the bright new dawn of Robbins-principle meritocracy

Guardian

Lodge's vignettes of army life are spiced with a wit that is both droll and mordant, and his characters are deftly rendered...Lodge's novel is a moving glimpse of a world on the cusp of a change: Janus-faced, profound above all in its uncertainties.

Lettie Ransley, Observer

An authentic picture of the sordid futility of National Service... I found the total recall agreeably unnerving

Christopher Ricks, New Statesman

National Service has rarely been better evoked... an extremely well-told, well-organised story

Times Literary Supplement