To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

A genuinely funny book. Not funny in the wry-smirk way of so many 'comic' novels. Actually funny

Telegraph

Glorious . . . A very, very funny novel. If misanthropy's going to come from anywhere it's from a lifetime's confrontation with halitosis

BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review

Funny in the way that only really serious books can be

Guardian

Genuine, funny, tragic and never dull. It'll also leave you flossing with a vengeance

Smart, sad, hilarious and eloquent . . . a writer at the top of his game and surpassing the promise of his celebrated debut

Kirkus

This is one of the funniest, saddest, sweetest novels I've read since Then We Came to the End. When historians try to understand our strange, contradictory era, they would be wise to consult To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. It captures what it is to be alive in early 21st-century America like nothing else I've read

Anthony Marra

Very funny [and] highly entertaining . . . Josh Ferris is a gifted satirist and very much in touch with the fear and paranoia that undercut US society

Irish Times

Geek-smart prose and wry humour . . . hilarious

Economist

Joshua Ferris has proved his astonishing ability to spin gold from ordinary air . . . As brave and adept as any writer out there

New York Times Book Review

It's a pleasure watching this young writer confidently range from the registers of broad punchline comedy to genuine spiritual depth . . . There's a happy side effect to reading the novel, as well: If you're a backslider like I was, it will guilt you into flossing again

Wall Street Journal

An engrossing and hilariously bleak novel about a dentist being shook out of his comfortable atheism . . . This splintering of the self hasn't been performed in fiction so neatly since Philip Roth's "Operation Shylock'

Boston Globe

Ferris [is] a Virgil of the disaffected . . . This is the novel's peculiar brilliance, to uncover its existential stakes in the most mundane tasks

LA Times

Laugh-out-loud hilarious, combining Woody Allen's New York nihilism with an Ivy League vocabulary

Booklist

Returns Ferris to the comedy of the workplace . . . his writing is so fresh and modern - a comedian's sense of timing mixed with a social critic's knack for shaking the bushes

Interview Magazine

Funny and surprisingly moving

Glamour

It is completely wonderful . . . Good god he is talented

Sarah Jessica Parker

Brilliant . . . witty . . . passages of flashing comedy that sound like a stand-up theologian suffering a nervous breakdown

Washington Post

Joshua Ferris excels at mordantly comic novels about ordinary people in crisis . . . he writes with brio about the modern condition

Metro

Compelling but never cheap, inventive but never obscure . . . Ferris has secured his status as exactly the sort of mainstream literary novelist American fiction needs

Independent on Sunday

A hoot . . . There's a tincture of Pynchonian paranoia à la The Crying of Lot 49 here, and a dash, too, of the kitchen-sink comic winsomeness that the Dave Eggers generation brought to US literary fiction

FT

This is fierce, pithy, unforgiving satire, taking a sledgehammer to all-American cracker-barrel homeliness. Its comic energy is fuelled by disgust and exasperation, in the tradition of Roth and Heller and John Kennedy O'Toole. But Ferris is also a dab hand at more delicate humour, every bit as contemporary . . . Ferris is very funny . . . His voice is unique

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Joshua Ferris has been heralded as one of America's sharpest observers of 21st-century life and, reading his third novel, it's easy to see why. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour has the immediacy and the trenchant satire of a brilliant stand-up routine as well as the big ideas and the in-depth research of a brilliant academic paper

Express

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a funny novel, by turns ha-ha, peculiar and, like O'Rourke himself, suspended between heaven and earth

Independent

A riotously funny novel, whose narrator is engagingly out of step with the world around him. As engrossing as it is uproarious.

Spectator

Ferris is famously good at writing about the workplace . . . and very good at portraying a man whose job is fixing teeth

London Review of Books

The CATCH-22 of dentistry

Stephen King

People who can make comedy from human tragedy are rare and wonderful. It's an incredibly hard thing to do and takes a kind of genius to deliver it on the page

Peter Florence, founder of Hay Literary Festival