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All My Friends Are Superheroes
By Andrew Kaufman
This quirky little book is an absolute delight: funny, surprising and poetic all in one.
Tom is not a superhero. All his friends are. And he has married one: the Perfectionist. Unfortunately for him, on the day of their wedding, one of her ex-boyfriends, Hypno, still in love and jealous, has hypnotised her into not seeing Tom. They have now been married for six months but the Perfectionist thinks Tom has left her. She is miserable. He is desperate to make himself seen.
She has decided to rebuild her life on the other side of Canada. Waiting to board a flight from Toronto to Vancouver, Tom has to make himself visible to the Perfectionist before they land or all will be lost.
The novel goes back and forth between the present desperate hours when Tom is trying to break Hypno’s spell and the story of the disastrous six months of their marriage, interspersed with flashbacks from before that period and wonderful little vignettes describing Tom’s various superheroes friends.
These have nothing in common with Spiderman or Superman. They were all introduced to Tom by the Amphibian, a creature Tom saved whilst cleaning a swimming-pool. There is the Shadowless Man who was abandoned by his shadow one morning, the Businessman who calculates continuously or the Impossible Man who has realised the impossibility of all his dreams. Then there is the Clock who can travel in time, the Sloth who doesn’t care about anything, the Inverse who reveals the exact opposite of your life when you shake his hand and many others, all more inventive than the next. But in this world, there are no villains.
I won’t say if Tom manages to make himself seen by the Perfectionist in the end. Suffice to say that love is probably the greatest superpower of all and that this is a charming book in the vein of Boris Vian, a book to enjoy and dream about. What would be your superpower?…
Andrew Kaufman will be discussing his latest book at Jewish Book Week on Monday 27th February at 5.15pm
Click here to view this session
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