Jimmie works in a London call centre, helping holiday makers with the many different problems they present him with (including a woman who wants to attend a romantic spa break on her own, and another who says that her room is too orange). When not engaging with the calls, Jimmie is given to much fantasising about his colleagues. He’s also due to be hauled before his boss because of an incident that recently occurred in a toilet stall. Katharina Volckmer’s second novel is a bawdy treat, both hilarious and oddly melancholy in turn. And in Jimmie she’s created a modern day Ignatius J. Reilly (of John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’), a man trying to make sense of world designed to heap indignity upon indignity upon him from all angles. It’s a short-ish read, but packing an unholy amount of fun. RM

Published by Indigo Press