I absolutely love Mark Watson - he's one of my most favourite comedians so I was very excited when I heard about this book. I was even more excited when it appeared in a lovely email from Amazon a couple of weeks ago saying in was the Kindle Daily Deal - bargain!
Eleven is a tale of fate and a series of consequencs spiralling out of control (or the multipler effect as my geography teacher brain prefers!), starting off when our main character, Xavier, a late night radio DJ (which incidentally starts at 11pm), fails to intervene in a school boy fight.
I absolutely loved this book, although it did confuse me on occasions. It is a really clever read - Eleven is about 11 characters whose lives are intertwinned by this school yard incident through a series of knock-on effects, with their stories told over 11 chapters. Xavier fails to intervene in a bullying incident, this makes the boy's mum who is a food critic angry, leading her to write a scathing review of a local restaurant, this angers the drunken restaurant owner who sacks an overweight pot washer, who then goes on to mug an estate agent as he needs money to pay for his gym membership, the estate agent is then given a rubbish replacement phone with which he accidentally sends a rude text message to his boss, and so on before escalating with a big shocking twist at the end.
This is a great concept, my only bugbear is that a few of the characters were glossed over, which meant that occasionally I had to flick back through the book to remind myself who that person was, and the huge life changing event for Xavier, which resulted him in moving to the other side of the world and changing his name, didn't really play a huge role in the book.
A really refreshing read and definitely one of the most enjoyable reads I have had recently!
5/5
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