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  • Published: 16 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473584143
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 7 hr 24 min
  • Narrator: Ian Porter
  • RRP: $24.99

The F*ck-it List

Is this the most shocking thriller of the year?




Part political satire, part compulsive thriller, The F*ck-it List is John Niven at his coruscating best.

Brought to you by Penguin.

‘Gripping, terrifying and hilarious – John Niven is our Hunter S. Thompson.’ ADAM KAY, author of This Is Going to Hurt
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You're terminally ill.
Who do you kill?

Set in a near-future America, an America that has borne two terms of a Trump Presidency and is now in the first term of Donald’s daughter as president, Frank Brill, a retired small-town newspaper editor, lives in a world where the populist policies Trump is currently so keen to pursue have been a reality for some years and are getting even more extreme – an erosion of abortion rights, less and less gun control, xenophobic immigration policies.

Frank, a good man, has just been given a terminal diagnosis. Rather than compile a bucket list of all the things he’s ever wanted to do in his life, he instead has at the ready his ‘fuck-it list’. Because Frank has had to endure more than his fair share of personal misfortune. And he has the names of those who are to blame for all of the tragedies that have befallen him.

But eventually, as he becomes more accustomed to dishing out cold revenge and the stakes get higher and higher, and with a rogue county sheriff on his tail, there only remains one name left at the bottom of his fuck-it list.

Part political satire, part compulsive thriller, The F*ck-it List is John Niven at his coruscating best.
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'It's F**KING TERRIFYING and brilliant and gripping and tragic and humane. Such a well-written book, with such vivid efficient prose, a powerful political plea disguised as a revenge novel. It's brilliant.' MARIAN KEYES

© John Niven 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

  • Published: 16 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473584143
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 7 hr 24 min
  • Narrator: Ian Porter
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

John Niven

John Niven was born in Irvine, Ayrshire. He is the author of ten novels and has written for a wide range of publications, including a weekly column for the Scottish Sunday Mail. He lives in Buckinghamshire.

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Praise for The F*ck-it List

Gripping, terrifying and hilarious – John Niven is our Hunter S. Thompson.

Adam Kay

Terrifying and brilliant and gripping and tragic and humane ... it becomes progressively more tense … This should be mandatory reading for every U.S. citizen … Such a well-written book, with such vivid efficient prose, a powerful political plea disguised as a revenge novel. It’s brilliant.

Marian Keyes

Loved it. A ferocious revenge story which also manages to be sweetly uplifting. A book Donald Trump would call f*cking nasty.

Robert Webb

[The F*ck-it List] took me by surprise – a thriller with humanity as well as tension.

Ian Rankin

Of course, of course, John Niven does it again. It is impossible to read him without laughing out loud one second, and feeling guiltily exhilarated the next. His perfectly observed writing has taken us to many dark places over the years, but this may be the darkest yet: an America of the very-near future, whose stifling horrors he conjours all-too-believably. Niven is a writer of wicked humour and outrageous charm – but he is a profoundly moral writer, too. And while this is a brilliantly observed revenge story, it’s also a terrifyingly unsettling satire of a world just around the corner. Its warnings will stay with me as long as its wit.

Marina Hyde

Hilarious and horrifying in equal measure ... [A] compulsive revenge thriller ... Niven vividly portrays the terror of a world where children are encouraged to take guns to school and protesters get so badly beaten it’s a wonder they bother. Mind-blowingly brilliant.

Daily Mail

This road trip through America of 2026, with Ivanka Trump now president, niftily combines a case study of one life wrecked by her father (who reverses legal abortion) with a satirical speculative survey of his legacy, for minimal gun control to a cowed media, migrant detention gulags to wars with Iran and North Korea. And, as fans of Niven’s music-biz novel Kill Your Friends will expect, his anger-powered prose is not short of bite and verve.

The Sunday Times

Full of angry energy.

The Times

[T]he book is masterfully controlled and highly entertaining, with surprising elements of serious reflection on ageing, regret, and mortality. Think Elmore Leonard, only politicised

Evening Standard

The most excoriating, shocking thing I have ready about Trump’s America

Damian Barr, The Observer

John Niven’s latest acerbic novel offers a short, sharp dose of misery and hopelessness – a glimpse into a near-future America that will shock to the core […] It is a shocking book on so many levels, but most of all because it is scarily easy to imagine some of it playing out in reality.

Irish Examiner

I absolutely loved this book. I read it in two sittings, it would have been one but I started late at night and I couldn't keep my eyes open! […] I'm giving this book 5 out of 5 stars. The writing is just brilliant and makes me want to read everything else John Niven has written.

Blog Lovin

Nobody does cutting satire quite like John Niven. For years he has been the spiky in-your-face voice of Britain's Generation-X

Sun

Just the right side of absurd, it's a compelling and bloody page-turner

Tatler

John Niven's The F*ck it List has a similar setup to the film Falling Down, but with a dodgy president running a dodgier US at its core. It's sharp, funny and unlikely to see its author invited to many Republican golf tourneys.

Ian Rankin, Guardian

An utterly addictive revenge novel.

Daily Mail

An utterly addictive revenge novel [...] The heartbreak and hilarity ratchet up simultaneously

Irish Daily Mail

[Niven] writes with all the savage, righteous energy needed to carry us along with it.

The Herald