Bullet Points

Bullet Points

by Mark Watson (Author)

Synopsis

Psychologist Peter Kristal has a method for sorting out people's lives. By arranging their histories like the index entries in a biography - --born, 1--achieves various things, 2-x --dies, x+1- the sequences of cause and effect that have led to their particular neuroses is cunningly revealed. His technique gains him a modicum of success: a thriving practise in Chicago (a far cry from his native East Anglia), with a client list comprised of rising stars. But, Pete is constantly aware that his childhood friend, Richard Aloisi, is always one lap ahead of him. Based in New York, Richard is treating A-list celebrities and advising the NYPD on high-profile court cases. Pete would be the first to admit that his inferiority complex is the key bullet point in his life. But by concentrating on Richard as the source of his problems, he is blind to other factors which put both his life and the lives of others at risk. Never as obvious as it purports to be, Bullet Points is a wonderfully witty, pacey, clever novel that keeps you guessing to the very end. Twenty-three-year-old Mark Watson has imagined himself into the head of a middle-aged man with remarkable skill, creating a character whose destructive sense of inadequacy will touch a nerve in anyone who has wanted to be someone else.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Published: 05 Feb 2004

ISBN 10: 0701176091
ISBN 13: 9780701176099
Book Overview: Take Dave Eggers, Ben Elton and John Lanchester (in Debt to Pleasure mode) and you might get a sense of this brilliant first novel from a prodigiously talented 23- year- old stand- up comedian.

Media Reviews
Fresh and imaginative, with wonderful flashes of humour.
-- Independent


From the Trade Paperback edition.
Author Bio
Mark Watson was born in Bristol on February 13 1980 and educated at Bristol Grammar School and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he read English. He wrote the first draft of 'Bullet Points' in Toronto, where he worked briefly as a TV extra for 'Queer As Folk' and other shows of dubious merit. He has been performing on the stand-up comedy circuit since leaving university and, in 2002, won the Daily Telegraph Open Mic Award. He was nominated for a Perrier Best Newcomer Award in 2001 for the show 'Far Too Happy' and has been a runner up in Channel 4's 'So You Think You're Funny'. Bullet Points was originally a short story written for a competition in Cambridge. Although it won a prize, it was rejected by the student creative writing magazine, who never once published any of Watson's work in three years. The smouldering resentment which followed this long-term snub was probably what provided the impetus for the novel.