Thornton explores the gentle complexities of this odd couple with wit and warmth

Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume

The indiest book of all time

Brilliant depictions of the era...nails it so precisely

With The Alternative Hero, Tim Thornton has gone through the looking glass of obsessive fandom and brought back a hilarious, memorable, and hard-rocking tale

A deliciously bittersweet novel that will touch the heart of anybody who ever fell in love with rock and roll

Sparkly and authentic

It's the usual lad-lit comic romp ... but it's fresher, funnier and more amiable than most

No one can make you feel quite like Stephen Fry can . . . Funny and tormentedly frank

Hugely enjoyable . . . compulsively readable . . . Fry is excellent on the details of memory, too, and always able to embellish them with effortless erudition . . . this engaging, engrossing read is as honest a portrait of a young liar as one could hope to read

He is bubbly, funny and charming, and he gives his fans plenty of material if they want to speculate on why he is both so gifted and so wayward

The jokes . . . transcend the complexes of the joker, turning the Stephenesque into a national as well as a family treasure

Not so much an autobiography, more a way of life; discursive, funny, sometimes almost unbelievably sad, opinionated, nostalgic and very infectious

Fry can be funny about anything

So charming and so acute that one cannot help forgiving him