The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Puckoon

Puckoon

Summary

DISCOVER PUCKOON, SPIKE MILLIGAN'S CLASSIC SLAPSTICK NOVEL

'Pops with the erratic brilliance of a careless match in a box of fireworks' Daily Mail

In 1924 the Boundary Commission is tasked with creating the new official division between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. Through incompetence, dereliction of duty and sheer perversity, the border ends up running through the middle of the small town of Puckoon.

Houses are divided from outhouses, husbands separated from wives, bars are cut off from their patrons, churches sundered from graveyards. And in the middle of it all is poor Dan Milligan, our feckless protagonist, who is taunted and manipulated by everyone (including the sadistic author) to try and make some sense of this mess . . .

'Bursts at the seams with superb comic characters involved in unbelievably likely troubles on the Irish border' Observer

'Our first comic philosopher' Eddie Izzard

Reviews

  • Bursts at the seams with superb comic characters involved in unbelievably likely troubles on the Irish border
    Observer

About the author

Spike Milligan

A legendary and iconic figure, Spike Milligan was born at Ahmednagar in India in 1918. He received his first education in a tent in the Hyderabad Sindh desert and graduated from there, through a series of Roman Catholic schools in India and England, to the Lewisham Polytechnic. He then plunged into the world of Show Business, seduced by his first stage appearance, at the age of eight, in the nativity play of his Poona convent school. He began his career as a band musician, but became famous as a humorous scriptwriter and actor in both films and broadcasting. Over the course of his astonishing career, he wrote over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children's stories. He was the creator, principal writer and performer of the infamous Goon Show, and went on to become one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Spike received an honorary CBE in 1992 and Knighthood in 2000. He died in 2002.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more