Additional Information | |||
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Title | Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim | Height | 19 mm |
Author | Jonathan Coe | Width | 12 mm |
ISBN-13 | 9780141033921 | Binding | PAPERBACK |
ISBN-10 | #0141033924 | Spine Width | |
Publisher | PENGUIN BOOKS | Pages | 352 |
Edition | Availability | In Stock |

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Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
Author: Jonathan Coe
Maxwell Sim cant seem to make a single meaningful connection. His absent father was always more interested in poetry; he maintains an e-mail correspondence with his estranged wife, though under a false identity; his incomprehensible teenage daughter prefers her BlackBerry to his conversation; and his best friend since childhood is refusing to return his calls. He has seve Maxwell Sim cant seem to make a single meaningful connection. His absent father was always more interested in poetry; he maintains an e-mail correspondence with his estranged wife, though under a false identity; his incomprehensible teenage daughter prefers her BlackBerry to his conversation; and his best friend since childhood is refusing to return his calls. He has seventy-four friends on Facebook, but nobody to talk to. In an attempt to stir himself out of this horrible rut, Max quits his job as a customer liaison at the local department store and accepts a strange business proposition that falls in his lap by chance: hes hired to drive a Prius full of toothbrushes to the remote Shetland Islands, part of a misguided promotional campaign for a dental-hygiene company intent on illustrating the slogan We Reach Furthest. But Maxs trip doesnt go as planned, as hes unable to resist making a series of impromptu visits to important figures from his past who live en route. After a string of cruelly enlightening and intensely awkward misadventures, he finds himself falling in love with the soothing voice of his GPS system (Emma) and obsessively identifying with a sailor who perpetrated a notorious hoax and subsequently lost his mind. Eventually Max begins to wonder if perhaps its a severe lack of self-knowledge thats hampering his ability to form actual relationships. A humane satire and modern-day picaresque, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is a gently comic and rollickingly entertaining novel about the paradoxical difficulties of making genuine attachments in a world of advanced communications technology and rampant social networking.