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Have You Eaten Grandma?
Have You Eaten Grandma?
Oct 9, 2024 6:15 PM

Author:Gyles Brandreth

Have You Eaten Grandma?

Pedantic about punctuation or scrupulous about spelling? You'll love this hilarious and definitive guide to 21st century language from grammar-guru Gyles Brandreth

'Brandreth excels . . . in all his linguistic joie de vivre' Guardian

Don't know if it's, like, okay to say 'like'?

Are your apostrophe's in the wrong place?

Want to make fewer not less grammatical mistakes?

Then do not despair, Have You Eaten Grandma? is the definitive (and hilarious) guide to punctuation, spelling, and good English for the twenty-first century.

Self-confessed grammar guru Gyles Brandreth pokes fun at the linguistic foibles of our time, tells us where we've been going wrong (and how to put it right), and reveals his tips and tricks to make every one of us better, more confident users (not abusers) of the English language. End of.

Is 'End of' alright? Wait, is 'alright' all right?

You'll find out right here . . .

This hilarious companion to 21st century language is perfect for anyone pedantic about punctuation or scrupulous about spelling.

'A laugh-a-lot, spanning everything . . . great book, I'm loving this' Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2

Reviews

Best thing ever, laugh-a-lot, spanning everything. Great book, I'm loving this

—— Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2

Brilliant, clear, entertaining, very funny and often outright silly. Brandreth excels . . . in all his linguistic joie de vivre and amusing self-awareness

—— Guardian

A witty and well-informed guide to the vagaries of English grammar. Heed his words; you won't regret it

—— Country & Town House, (Best Books to Go Under the Christmas Tree)

Whether you are obsessed with getting grammar right, baffled by grammar or (like us) just in love with words, you are going to love this. A hilarious and definitive guide to 21st-century language

—— Newcastle Evening Chronicle

An informal guide to punctuation, spelling and good English for the twenty-first century

—— Strong Words

This is a grammar guide that only Gyles Brandreth could write! Full of humour throughout, this is his definitive guide to punctuation, spelling and good English for the twenty-first century

—— Stratford-Upon-Avon Herald

The wordsmith's wordsmith guides us through the delights of the English language

—— Daily Mail

A book of extraordinary importance and urgency - we need this book now. For its determined, passionate, and vulnerable seeking; for its insistence on what matters. Climate catastrophe tells us the reach of the desk killer has never been greater. We must take the hope and political will in this book as our own: forged in darkness and therefore - inextinguishable.

—— Anne Michaels

Gretton raises profoundly unsettling questions about the capacity for doing evil that exists within all of us, and the ways in which the distancing effect of technology allows perpetrators to avoid thinking about the consequences of their actions.

—— Hugh Linehan , Irish Times

A testament both mighty and meticulous, a devastating case for the prosecution, against which there is no defence. This book should be compulsory reading.

—— Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey/Savage Grace.

It is much more than a history of bureaucratic crime. Rather, Gretton has written himself deeply and intimately into the work, which also serves as a poignant memoir; a travelogue that leads the reader through time and space, history and memory; and an extended exercise in observation and introspection.

—— Washington Post

A classic anti (or counter-intuitive) self-help treatise -- robustly argued, intellectually sturdy, laced with self-deprecatory humour... it is deeply empathetic to the trials of the creative life

—— Livemint

I have valued Samantha Harvey's company through her memoir of insomnia, The Shapeless Unease. Harvey's description of not sleeping as a kind of assault feels utterly true.

—— Emilie Pine , Irish Times *Best Books of 2020*

A small miracle of a book. Reading it feels like its own kind of lucid dream … You would imagine a book written in such circumstances would have a hazy quality, but in fact its clarity of expression is startling. It's a fireworks display. It's also a profound meditation on language and loss and time, and on how we construct ourselves through stories. And it's painful. And it's beautiful. And I love it. Samantha Harvey is the most exceptionally gifted of authors, and here she demonstrates that she can literally do anything.

—— Nathan Filer

I am still shuddering, almost, from the beautiful, beautiful writing and its broken, angry, vibrant demand – a dare almost – to accept life, and brave it, with all it brings.

—— Cynan Jones

A creative account of a life with little sleep… Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times.

—— Helen Davies , Sunday Times

It's funny, sad, wry, always worrying away at the mystery of sleep and its absence and finding endless new angles so that the whole has something of the quality of those waking dreams that haunt the insomniac and are her private country.

—— Andrew Miller

A slim, intense memoir about her own year-long experience of nocturnal unrest… a torture Harvey describes with a combination of desperation, wry humour and — despite the scarcity she is subjected to — a deeply felt sense of life’s abundance… [her] proseglows off the page: an exacting inquisition of the self leading to imperfect peace.

—— Catherine Taylor , Financial Times

[Harvey is] brilliant on words and the nature of writing.

—— Roger Alton , Daily Express

[With The Shapeless Unease] Harvey has certainly proved that insomnia, as much as any of the more obviously nasty diseases, might be as worthy a subject of literature as love, battle or jealousy…her book rises to that level.

—— Jake Kerridge , Sunday Telegraph

[A] bravely exposing deep dive into the emotional murk of her [Havey’s] restless mind….[it] reveals…the irresistible writerly impulse to pin experience to the page.

—— Anthony Cummins , i

[The Shapeless Unease] reads like a dream sequence… Even reading this made me feel dizzy… [Harvey is] a vigorous, eloquent writer… she conveys the way sleeplessness takes you into the death zone of life.

—— Ysenda Maxtone Graham , Tablet

Mesmerising…at times, bitingly funny… [The Shapeless Unease is] an engrossing portrait of the fragility of identity and coherency in the grip of insomnia. I hadn’t read Harvey before this, but her facility with language here captivated me and I’ll be seeking out her novels next.

—— Valerie O’Riordan , Bookmunch

Urgent and full of arresting images and insights.

—— Stephanie Cross , Lady

[The Shapeless Unease] is littered with sharp insights expressed in exquisitely lucid prose but is as amorphous as its title suggests.

—— Keiron Pim , Spectator

It’s a claustrophobic, enlightening, moving, existential treatise on sleep, insomnia and death. And it’s funny, too.

—— Sadie Jones , Guardian

I wish I had saved The Shapeless Unease to read in isolation but Samantha Harvey’s book about insomnia, time, death and so many unknowable things is a blessing to have in lonely times. It is a profound and stunning book but funny, too.

—— Fatima Bhutto , Evening Standard

A beautiful, jagged little book about insomnia and so many unknowable things: life and death, Buddhism, and how language alters our thinking. But I was most struck by its form and structure.

—— Fatima Bhutto , New Statesman

[Samantha Harvey's] cerebral, startlingly clear account of somehow pulling through [from insomnia] carries an electric charge and meditates on not only the mystery of sleep but also writing, swimming and dreams.

—— Net-a-Porter

[The Shapeless Unease] is beautifully crafted and its achievement makes itself more apparent on a second reading.

—— Richard Gwyn , Wales Art Review

A masterpiece, so good I can hardly breathe. I'm completely floored by it.

—— Helen Macdonald

This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed... Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories... To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases.

—— Katy Waldman , New Yorker
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