The Giles Wareing Haters' Club - Tim Dowling

Giles Wareing has started telling people he's forty, even though he's actually thirty-nine years and eleven months. It's supposed to help him conquer the fear, but in fact he has only given the fear a four-week head start. Giles is a freelance writer of amusing articles for a national newspaper. One day, feeling particularly fortyish, he happens to type 'Giles Wareing+unfunny' into a search engine. And that's when he discovers the thread. The thread is called 'The Giles Wareing Haters' Club', and is entirely devoted to holding everything he has ever written up to excoriating criticism and ridicule.

As Giles becomes obsessed with the thread, with tracking down its participants, his angst begins to focus on one particularly scornful contributor, and it soon becomes clear that things are going really quite badly wrong . . .

A tragedy, a farce and a detective story, The Giles Wareing Haters' Club is an absorbing, hilarious and razor-sharp look at the modern male in all his dysfunctional glory.

'Entertaining and unexpectedly poignant' Times Literary Supplement

'Very funny . . .Cringe comedy at its best' GQ

'An acerbically dry and hilarious tale' InStyle