Legoland

by Gerard Woodward

A stunning new collection of stories from the Man Booker Prize and Whitbread Prize shortlisted author.

Many of Legoland's stories begin with the seemingly every day, only for a turn of events to land them in an unsettling place where life's normal rules no longer apply. Whether he's writing about a child’s birthday party or the invasion of an unnamed country each story is full of Woodward's blacker-than-black humour, fearless surrealism, and poetic phrasing. Included here is his brilliant story 'The Family Whistle', shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

Legoland celebrates Woodward's trademark gift for wit and surprise: his lithe prose carrying us from comedy to tragedy and back again within a single tale. It confirms him as one of the most gifted and original writers of our time.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

320 pages, Paperback

Published March 23, 2017

About the author

Gerard Woodward (born 1961) is a British novelist, poet and short story writer, best known for his trilogy of novels concerning the troubled Jones family, the second of which, I'll Go To Bed at Noon, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man-Booker Prize.[1] He was born in London and briefly studied painting at Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall. He later attended the London School of Economics, where he studied Social Anthropology, and Manchester University, where he studied for an MA in the same subject. In 1989 he won a major Eric Gregory Award for poets under thirty and his first collection of poetry, Householder, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1991. His first novel, August, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. In 2011 he was writer in residence at Columbia College, Chicago. He is currently Professor of Fiction at Bath Spa University.

Reviews

[Carrie Etter · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best short story collections I've read in a good while. Woodward has a real way with the "gently odd"--baboons becoming more present in a city, a man losing his memory and having only a playing card with the protagonist's name and number on it, the evolving role a gorilla mask has in a family. I'm sure I'll revisit it and recommend it to others.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of fifteen stories by Gerard Woodward, many of them unsettling in varying degrees. Take The Family Whistle for instance, in which a German POW returns to his home from a Soviet Camp many years after the end of the war to find his wife living with a man who claims to be him, or The Fall of Mr and Mrs Nicholson, in which a writer of gentle fables is summoned to a dictator’s palace to write a speech that will avert an uprising and summary justice against the dictator and his vicious wife (this is clearly modelled on the last day of the Ceaucescus in Romania). The Flag has a similarly claustrophobic and threatening atmosphere, following the misfortunes of a family who fail to display the flag of an invading power during a victory procession through the streets of the capital. The final story, Neighbours, has a distinctly Ballardian feel, as baboons, driven from their native forests by logging and overdevelopment, first move into a city and then begin to take it over. The best story though (and by some way the longest) is painted on a much more domestic canvas. This is The Unloved, which forms the centrepiece of the collection, and features a woman who leaves her tedious botanist husband after many years of marriage and moves into a small terraced house to explore a new-found independence, the first she has ever experienced. It’s a subtle, moving and sad tale, beautifully told.

[David Hudson · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Family Whistle' and 'The Unloved' were the strongest stories in this anthology due to their powerful characters and the stories' denouement.

All stories were well written, addicting, and reminders of Carver's symbolism and subtlety but some stories did not quite know where they wanted to get to or what they wanted to say.

Gerard Woodward is an impeccable writer, strewing fine details in his interesting and gripping stories about everything from a coup d'etat which results in the submission of a headstrong family to a writer's failure to come up with a speech for a powerful couple about to be ousted by a revolutionary movement.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderful collection of short stories by Man Booker shortlisted author Gerard Woodward. Enthusiastically surreal and darkly humorous portraits of the human condition, these fifteen tales are spellbinding. Highly, highly recommended

[Jessikah Hope · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining collection but it didn't change my world. Maybe some of it was a bit too abstract for me...

[Patti · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were ups and downs.

What's hard with short stories in general (and I'm definitely not a writer, just from a readers perspective) is that every story likely had a very different upbringing and context which it was developed in (or because of circumstances etc.). But im reading them one after the other, maybe impacted by the story before, yet forced to adapt to a very different idea/theme.

Applied here, I felt that, for example The Underhouse hat a very different feeling than Astronomy. Both were good to great, but different enough that one affects the judgement of the other when read in short succession.

I liked Legoland. The Cockatrice story, however, just felt weird and off. I know it's supposed to be surrealism, yet it just felt..off. And I know that's technically not criticism.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has the fizz and sparkle of life gone flat and tepid? Are good things happening for sinister reasons? This collection of short stories is quite the down beat.

The title story is about an amnesiac found wondering the M3 motor near UK's Legoland theme park, and his intrusion, cuckoo like, into another man's life.

"A Night Crossing" was like reading a 3rd party report of my own gloomy trip on the ferry from Portsmouth to St. Malo in 1994. If you are going to take a long night ferry do investigate the cost of a proper cabin, or take a day ferry and find lodgings near the target port.

Woodward effortless describes the quotidian and the little stresses of our modern lives.

[Amanda Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Legoland is a collection of odd and eccentric stories that balance on the edge of confusion. Many of the short stories intrigued me as the concepts were abstract and unlike anything else I have read. My favourites were 'the underhouse', 'the unloved' and 'the family whistle'.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book being a collection of short stories kept me reading, despite not particularly enjoying them. I found them a bit all over the place and lacking concrete substance. A bit too poetry-like for my taste. I also think this helped confirm to me that I'm not a fan of short stories.

[Paul Rosen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started reading this as I had time to kill in the library, and then took it home to finish. I'm not a huge fan of short stories and this book confirms that for me. The stories are intriguing and well-written but generally leave me wanting more - more context, more detail, more plot ... it's partly just the format that just doesn't work for me but also the style in these particular stories. Things happen in vaguely-specified countries where some monumental but not-fully-explained event has caused some trauma which is then the focus of the story. I don't regret trying this book out, but my next read will be a novel!

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a great collection of short stories.

[Tim Theobalds · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved these short stories and their dark humour

[Julie Mestdagh · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Legoland" is a wonderful collection of fifteen short stories written by the British author Gerard Woodward, who was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and Whitebread Prize. Fifteen completely different stories, covering a wide range of themes, such as the power of authority, family relationships, jealousy, imagination,… with as common characteristic the fact that the story starts out with a very familiar, daily scene until something unexpected suddenly happens and the regular rules in life no longer apply. Stories with a twist. Darn good twists. Really.

One of the stories is "the family twist", which was shortlisted for the Sunday times EFG Short story award. A story in which a woman's husband returns home after having fought in the war, only to discover his wide thinks he's been back for years because another man has already claimed his place. A brilliant story, and one of my favourites in the book, together with:
* legoland
* the under house
* the unloved ("her capacity to put up with unhappiness was one of her strongest qualities, she decided…)

"The title, "Legoland" offers a simile for the experience of reading the book too good to pass up. Immersion in these stories is comparable to entering an amusement park to which people carry the ordinary and everyday aspects of their lives, but which is also a hyperreal space marked by the marvellous and a carnival atmosphere. Repeatedly, Woodward’s stories astonish: they seem to offer a predictable direction, then swerve elsewhere. And just like the toy that lends the title story’s playground its name, these narratives are meticulously designed, building into dazzling and surprising structures". (The Guardian, 26/3/2016).

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was one of the lucky winners who received a copy of this book in a recent Goodreads First Reads giveaway.

I don't usually read short stories as they end too soon and am left disappointed. Legoland was a collection of short stories and I enjoyed them all. I hope to read more books by this author. Recommended.

[Tommy Forbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great. A solid collection of stories that for some reason felt so English and eccentric - even when dealing with German POWs. Throughout reading the voice in my mind was always that of John Kearns - which surprised me.