Williams, Nigel

(British, 1948– )

Williams has worked in television arts journalism and has written travel books as well as a series of comic novels. Begin with The Wimbledon Poisoner (1990), in which suburban husband Henry Farr makes increasingly desperate attempts to get rid of his feminist wife. The Wimbledon setting is common to a number of Williams's novels including the delightful They Came from SW19 (1992), narrated by a teenage boy whose father has just died and whose mother becomes involved with spiritualists claiming to be receiving messages from the other side. Fortysomething (1999) is the private diary of a middle-aged man (Wimbledon again), attempting to make sense of his newly successful wife, his near-adult sons (he is concerned they may be drug dealing until the consignment of ‘white goods’ he has heard about materializes as a load of fridges needing storage in his kitchen), and transsexual shenanigans at the BBC where his job as an actor in a radio serial is under threat. The narrator's pompous, self-obsessed, yet endearingly innocent voice will make you laugh aloud.

Sue Townsend, Douglas Adams, James Thurber. See HUMOUR  JR