I Have a Complaint to Make

Fred Carton, at the age of twenty-five, is stranded in a small country town surrounded by bowler hats and umbrellas; he owns neither. He steadfastly refuses to catch an early morning train anywhere, let alone to a City office.

If the price of living in this world is working for five days out of seven, he is not sure that the place is worth the price. ‘Any fool can go to work,’ he says, ‘Surviving without it is a much more subtle manoeuvre.’

But Fred’s half-hearted attempts to find an alternative fail spectacularly. When he tries to make money, he loses his girlfriend in a poker game…

The pressures – and Fred’s sense of alienation – increase. Finally he cracks. He buys a gun…

Book Author

Guy Bellamy was born in Bristol but has lived mostly in Surrey. After National Service in Germany with the RAF, he went into journalism and has worked on newspapers in Cornwall, Bournemouth, Brighton and Fleet Street including the Daily Express and Sun. He is married with a daughter and now lives in Hampshire.
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Book Reviews

• Auberon Waugh
  "Good for a laugh."
• Sunday Telegraph
  "Mr Bellamy is best when he is being sexy."
• Yorkshire Post
  "Breezy, amusing…a sharp accurate picture of a man with nothing in particular to live for."
• Isabel Quigley, Financial Times
  "Funny…also serious, inventive, sometimes touching and altogether likeable. Guy Bellamy makes another broadly applicable comedy out of the least exotic materials."