The Biscuit Thief

Burt Reckoning is a perfectly normal chap. He works at a biscuit factory and is in love with his co-worker Susan Fledgling. But one day he decides to take her up The Bum, a local hilltop beauty spot. This sets in motion a chain of events which sees Susan frozen solid during a night of snow and ice and then projected into orbit around the Earth. Burt meets the occupants of a supposed lost lunar (loony) base, before heading into a past Earth in an alternate future reality and meeting magicians, the inquisition, an alchemist and a scientist! All the while protected by a mysterious ghost who needs to keep Burt alive.

The Biscuit Thief is Rhys Hughes at his most mischievous and surreal. The wordplay and cunning contrivances come thick and fast as we're taken on a whistlestop tour of every literary genre available: from domestic comedy, through science fiction, fantasy, horror, western, and crime fiction; while taking in the very best that literary fiction can offer.

An astonishing novel of wit and warmth mixed with the surreal absurdity of life, told as only Hughes can.

'It is heartening to find a writer as eclectic, prolific and talented as Rhys Hughes.' MICHAEL MOORCOCK

PRAISE FOR RHYS HUGHES

'The writing is an absolute joy, managing to be both dry and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Subtle references are sprinkled throughout and I know I probably missed many, but nothing is lampshaded - the little in-jokes are there if you catch them, like a wink to a like-minded reader ... This really isn't like any book you've ever read, but I absolutely recommend it.' Cat Treadwell, The Fantasy Hive, about Growl at the Moon

'Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet's literature. He toys with convention. He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible.' MICHAEL MOORCOCK

"Quirky and fantastic and sometimes quite twisted, Rhys Hughes is a treat for those in the mood for something utterly different." - ELLEN DATLOW

"Rhys Hughes is an accomplished player with words, plots, effects, relationships, sensibilities; you name it, Hughes tries to stand it on its head. More often than seems attributable to mere chance, he succeeds." - ED BRYANT, LOCUS

"Dazzling prose. Put your feet up and dip in. Life will never seem quite the same again." - THE THIRD ALTERNATIVE

"I wore throughout the undisplaceable, unsequelchable rictus of a grin of both delight and amazement." - MICHAEL BISHOP

"The incredible richness of language, the inexhaustible array of puns, double entendres, weird metaphors, non-lexical use of words, and original turns of phrase... Rhys Hughes is essentially an absurdist humorist, though often of a peculiarly black, tricky, and sometimes bloody sort. Much of his work is travesty, drawing for substance on other works, which he uses as a basis for destructive humor, for reinterpretation in a different mode, or as a starting point for his own work. This statement is not meant in disparagement, for Hughes's new versions are highly original in conception and often brilliant." - SUPERNATURAL FICTION WRITERS (SCRIBNERS)

"Rhys Hughes is one of the most wildly inventive talents we are graced with today." - ALL HALLOWS