The Man Who Was Thursday
A Nightmare

I lost my backpack thanks to this book. It was years and years ago, probably my first winter in Japan, and I'd picked up this book at Maruzen. I had heard about Chesterton, mainly from the dedication page of Pratchett and Gamian's Good Omens ("The authors would like to join the demon Crowley in dedic......more

They say that LSD was first synthesisterised in 1938, so it couldn't be that. But opium was imbibed in British society as we know from Thomas de Quincy up to Sherlock Holmes, so I'm going with opium. This strange novel is a phantasmagoria which begins as a surrealistic spoof of Boy's-Own detective ad......more

Possibly the shortest way to describe Chesterton’s famous novel is to say that it is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for grownups. The story of Gabriel Syme is just as bizarre as that of little Alice. It also echoes in many ways with the oppressing nightmares of Kafka and Dostoyevsky. Still, The Man......more