Submarine

'Are we making a bomb?'

'This is a trust exercise, like in drama,' she says.

'Are we making a bomb as a trust exercise?'

Fifteen-year-old Oliver Tate is terrified that his family is falling apart. He fears for his depressed father and is convinced that his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher. Deciding that it is down to him alone to save his parents' marriage, Oliver sets out on a campaign to rescue it while also embarking on an even more ambitious goal: to lose his virginity before he's sixteen to the seductive but slightly pyromaniacal Jordana . . .

'The sharpest, funniest, rudest account of a troubled teenager's coming of age since The Catcher in the Rye' Independent

'A brilliant first novel by a young man of ferocious comic talent' The Times

Review: A brilliant first novel by a young man of ferocious comic talent * The Times *

Dunthorne captures the mores of Britain today better than novelists twice his age * New Statesman *

Brilliant . . . laugh-out-loud enjoyable. The sharpest, funniest, rudest account of a troubled teenager's coming-of-age since The Catcher in the Rye * Independent *

Transplants The Catcher in the Rye to south Wales . . . Dunthorne can make you laugh like you did during double physics on a wet Wednesday afternoon * Observer *

A richly amusing tale of mock GCSEs, sex, death and challenging vocabulary . . . Excruciatingly funny incidents and cracking gags * Time Out *

Excellent . . . the wonderful, Day-Glo certainties of adolescence have rarely been so brilliantly laid out * Independent on Sunday *

Dunthorne captures the mores of Britain today better than novelists twice his age. He is sure to write books that declare more than their vocabulary * New Statesman *