Nick Harkaway. (2014). Tigerman: A novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Nick Harkaway. 2014. Tigerman: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Nick Harkaway, Tigerman: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.

Nick Harkaway. Tigerman: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: crime fiction
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26. • value: books for men
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28. • value: gifts for men
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30. • value: sci-fi books
31. • value: video game books
32. • value: sci fi book
33. • value: realistic fiction books
34. • value: gifts for husband
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Harkaway, Nick
   • bioText: NICK HARKAWAY is the author of five novels, Titanium Noir, The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker, Tigerman, and Gnomon, as well as a nonfiction work about digital culture, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. He is also a regular blogger for The Bookseller's FutureBook website. He lives in London with his wife, a human rights lawyer, and their two children.
   • name: Nick Harkaway

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title

Tigerman

fullDescription

From the award-winning author of The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker—a novel at once heartfelt and thrilling about parenthood, friendship and secret identities, about heroes of both the super and the everyday kind. 
“An irresistible delight, something like Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand as played by James Bond.” —The Washington Post

Sergeant Lester Ferris is a good man in need of a rest. After a long career of being shot at, he's about to retire. The mildly larcenous, backwater island of Mancreu, a former British colony in legal limbo, belching toxic clouds of waste and facing imminent destruction by an international community afraid for their own safety, is the ideal place to serve out his time. There is an illicit Black Fleet lurking in the bay: spy stations, arms dealers, offshore hospitals, drug factories and torture centers. Lester's brief, however, is to sit tight and turn a blind eye, so he drinks tea and befriends a brilliant, Internet-addled street kid with a comic-book fixation. When Mancreu’s fragile society erupts in violence, Lester must be more than just an observer: he has no choice but to rediscover the man of action he once was, and find out what kind of hero the island—and the boy—will need.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Ron Charles, The Washington Post
   • content: "Tigerman is an irresistible delight, something like Major Pettigrew's Last Stand as played by James Bond. . . . What really makes Tigerman roar is its captivating blend of tones--from the light hues of domestic comedy to the bold colors of Spider-man. And Harkaway doesn't stop there: Like some Marvel mad scientist, he has crossed strains of a modern-day environmental crisis with the sweet story of a veteran of the Afghan war trying to adopt a little boy. . . . [Tigerman] is ultimately no comic-book fantasy, just as a poisoned island is no paradise. You won't see the next punch coming."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Jason Sheehan, All Things Considered, NPR
   • content: "The kind of good that makes you wonder why every book isn't this smart and joyous and beautiful and heartbreaking; that makes you a little bit pissed off that you ever gave away bits of your life to reading worse books, and sad that so many trees get wasted on authors with less grace, less surety, less confidence than this man who can throw comic books, video games, post-colonial guilt, the longing ache of the childless, murder, tea drinking and mystical tigers all together in a big hat, shake it vigorously, and draw from the resultant, jumbled mess something so beautiful."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Nicholas Mancusi, The Miami Herald
   • content: "This fantastic book deserves to be widely read and long remembered. . . . Harkaway writes with such a wonderful mix of humor, erudition, sensitivity and appreciation for a good bit of decidedly English fun."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Andrew Blom, The Boston Herald
   • content: "Harkaway takes over where guys like Kurt Vonne­gut left off. He walks the line between reality and fantasy and writes with a charming cynicism. . . . [A] mad genius."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Niall Alexander, Tor.com
   • content: "[Tigerman] is, in short, awesome. Read it immediately. . . . Abundantly funny. . . . And incredibly moving, too. . . . For all that Tigerman seems to be about a superhero on the surface, appearances are deceiving indeed: Harkaway is markedly more interested in the relationship between Lester and his friend. . . .In Harkaway's hands, this friendship is as gripping as any mystery."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Matthew Jackson, BookPage
   • content: "A funny, touching and meditative page-turner that will leave you thinking about what it really means to be a hero for days after you've finished it."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Reader's Digest
   • content: "An adventurous romp of a thriller which, like [its] hero Ferris, at its core contains a bit of longing. . . . But rest assured, Tigerman is full of win."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Largehearted Boy
   • content: "Packed with sharp wit and quick humor. . . . Harkaway's novel offers big rewards: a world slightly skewed from our own, and yet still recognizable as the backdrop for a story that asks big questions about parenting, friendship, family, heroes and how to go on living when the world is ending. The resulting novel is a rollick of a read, packing emotion, hilarity and a dose of self-deprecation into a story that is, to borrow a phrase from Lester's young friend, 'full of win.'" --Kerry McHugh, Shelf Awareness "A splendid book, literary fiction that defies genres as it tells a timely superhero story with intelligence and warmth."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Bill Ott, Booklist (starred review)
   • content: "Yet another bravura performance from a writer whose imagination knows no bounds. Nick Harkaway is at it again, celebrating pop culture, mixing genres like a mad scientist, and producing a book that is both profoundly moving and deliriously entertaining. . . . [But] Harkaway throws a spanner in the comic-book works, adding depth and complexity to the mix, more Haruki Murakami than Stan Lee."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
    • content: "Brilliantly imagined. . . . A hoot and a half, and then some: hands down, the best island farce since Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
    • content: "[A] poignant morality tale, equally fueled by emotion and adrenaline. . . . Adroitly explores the lengths one man will go to save what he's come to love, even in the face of almost-certain failure."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Stuart Kelly, The Guardian
    • content: "As much a homage to Graham Greene as to Stan Lee. . . . There are plenty of scrapes and escapades, lots of derring-do and derring-really-don't, building to a morally satisfying conclusion. . . . Through social media
13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from May 19, 2014
      All his tours of duty can’t prepare British army Sgt. Lester Ferris, a veteran of the War in Afghanistan, for life on an island facing certain ecological destruction, in Harkaway’s poignant morality tale, equally fueled by emotion and adrenaline. Though the fictional island of Mancreu, located somewhere in the Arabian sea, is no longer officially under the thumb of the British government—the Brits ceded control to an international peacekeeping force—Ferris is appointed brevet-consul, a largely ceremonial post that’s supposedly a last stop for him before he can leave army life behind for good. Mancreu is anything but an island paradise. Long exposed to harsh mining involving the island’s volcano, it’s a ticking time bomb, with the residents waiting for the next in a string of toxic events, known as “Clouds.” The sergeant’s only real friend, and surrogate son, is a comic-book-loving, Internet-slang-spouting teenage boy he calls Robin (think Batman), who helps him navigate Mancreu’s social and political intricacies. With a mishmash of countries all fighting for a piece of the island, either under the auspices of national pride or scientific experimentation, it’s no surprise that Mancreu has a thriving black market, operating out of a flotilla of ships moored just outside the harbor. The murder of one of Ferris’s acquaintances sets off a chain of increasingly violent events that coincide with an incoming Cloud, all of which threaten to destroy not only the bodies but the minds of Mancreu’s inhabitants. Harkaway (Angelmaker) adroitly explores the lengths one man will go to save what he’s come to love, even in the face of almost-certain failure.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from July 1, 2014
      Imagine Superman in Grand Fenwick and you'll have some idea of Harkaway's (Angelmaker, 2012, etc.) brilliantly imagined latest romp."It's amazing being a superhero," says Lester Ferris as the action winds down at the end of Harkaway's latest. "It's totally mad." Ferris, aka the Sergeant, hasn't been on Mancreu for long, but he's lived 10 lifetimes there. Posted to a supposedly quiet patch of earth after long, soul-shattering duty in Afghanistan ("the Americans called it a Total Goatfuck") and Iraq, he's found himself on a spit of land out in the Arabian Sea that, thanks to climate change, is in danger of receding under the waves-but until that time is a convenient entrepot for drug dealers, arms smugglers, pirates, spies, defectors, flimflam artists, multinational corporatists and all the usual suspects, not least of them numerous powers NATO and otherwise: "[V]arious interests," writes Harkaway, "were making use of the lawless nature of the Mancreu waters for things they might not otherwise be able to do." Mancreu's hub is a cafe owned by a fine fellow named Shola, who's mowed down by gunmen for no apparent reason. The Sergeant, aided-or perhaps not-by shadowy figures flying the stars and stripes and the tricolor, is at a loss until, visited of a night by a tiger, he takes on the superhero guise of the title, suggested to him by a comic-book-loving, lonely teenager helpfully named Robin. The ensuing showdown is full of in-jokes, knowing nods to the headlines and miscreant Belgians, which will please fans of Monty Python if not necessarily the good burghers of Antwerp. The cast of characters is straight out of a Milton Caniff cartoon, with names like Bad Jack, White Raoul and the Witch, but the burdens poor Mancreu has to bear, from land rape and gang war to toxic dumping and international intrigue, are thoroughly modern millstones.A hoot and a half, and then some: hands down, the best island farce since Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle half a century ago.

      COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from July 1, 2014
      Harkaway is at it again, celebrating pop culture, mixing genres like a mad scientist, and producing a book that is both profoundly moving and deliriously entertaining. This time his canvas is not nearly as broad as it was in Angelmaker (2012), with the action limited to one moment in time and one confined place. But what a place! Mancreu is a tiny Asian island on the brink of extinction. Polluted beyond salvation, with noxious gases belching from its core, Mancreu is scheduled to be evacuated, then obliterated. Meanwhile, lawlessness reigns, with a motley crew of British, French, American, and Japanese officials looking on aimlessly as the island is overcome with the deep, dark brown taste of gloom. The British representative, Lester Ferris, a former soldier put out to pasture in Mancreu, is told only not to make waves. That's fine with Lester until he befriends a mysterious island boy, a lover of comics and a whiz on the Internet. When Lester's and the boy's friend, a caf' owner, is murdered in front of their eyes, the boy wants revenge and expects Lester to step up. If Harkaway's debut, The Gone-Away World (2008), was his take on postapocalyptic fiction, and Angelmaker a kind of Dickens-meets-steampunk epic, then this novel is an ode to superhero comics. To please the boy, whom he calls Robin, Lester dons a self-styled superhero costume, complete with some twenty-first-century weaponry, and sets off as Tigerman to right a wrong world, hoping to show Robin that sometimes someone does fix it. Mancreu can't be fixed, of course, and it is at this point that Harkaway throws a spanner in the comic-book works, adding depth and complexity to the mix, more Haruki Murakami than Stan Lee. While Tigerman romps, Harkaway slips in a moving (surrogate) father-son drama, but nothing is quite what it seems. Yet another bravura performance from a writer whose imagination knows no bounds.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

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From the award-winning author of The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker—a novel at once heartfelt and thrilling about parenthood, friendship and secret identities, about heroes of both the super and the everyday kind. 
“An irresistible delight, something like Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand as played by James Bond.” —The Washington Post

Sergeant Lester Ferris is a good man in need of a rest. After a long career of being shot at, he's about to retire. The mildly larcenous, backwater island of Mancreu, a former British colony in legal limbo, belching toxic clouds of waste and facing imminent destruction by an international community afraid for their own safety, is the ideal place to serve out his time. There is an illicit Black Fleet lurking in the bay: spy stations, arms dealers, offshore hospitals, drug factories and torture centers. Lester's brief, however, is to sit tight and turn a blind eye, so he drinks...

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