Muck

With their only son on the brink of adolescence the nouveaux-riches Sherbornes move away from the city to start a new gentrified existence on a three-hundred-acre farmor estatein Taonga New Zealand. But life on the farm is anything but wholesome. Sherborne evokes his familys slide into madness through a series of unforgettable hilarious portraits: of Feet his once-glamorous mother now addled with snobbery paranoia and mental illness; of The Duke his uncomprehending sporadically violent father; and of himself the Lord Muck of the title at once helpless victim and ruthless agent of their undoing who in the end must decide whether he can save his family. Clear-sighted lyrical and marvelously funny Muck has been widely hailed as a masterpiece. It is a heartrending memoir of family discord and an exquisite story of a young artist in search of a self.