Small World – David Lodge

What a delight it is to revisit an old favourite and find it as sharp and hilarious as I thought it at my last reading sometime around 1994.

This is a wondrous tale of academics chasing sex and the grail-like UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism in a globe-trotting whirl of international conferences. The plot is a cunning riff on the Romance genre, about which characters pontificate as a kind of commentary within the novel itself.

And it’s really, really funny.