New Cardiff — James Webb

Colin is heart­bro­ken. His, what he thought, girl­friend Vera is mar­ry­ing some­body else and he got the invi­ta­tion to the wed­ding to prove it. In this state of mind, he trav­els to Amer­ica and gets off the bus in New Cardiff. The rea­son? He liked the memo­r­ial statue. In the first min­utes he is there he gets that this town is a whole lot dif­fer­ent than Lon­don and he finds him­self pour­ing his heart out to total strangers. This is how he meets Mandy. She is a sweet naive girl and gets Colin out of his slump and draw­ing again. All is well, but then Vera comes to New Cardiff. She has an announce­ment to make.

This very humor­ous book will take you away from your own life. Two main rea­sons for that: first, the story is great with lots of explicit and implicit humor, but sec­ond and more impor­tant, this book con­tains mostly direct dia­log. You get very lit­tle to go on when it comes to tone of speech, sur­round­ings, man­ners, etc. You have to pic­ture them all your­self by read­ing the dia­log. So although this book is straightforward, it will keep you very busy. No sit­ting back and relax, but mak­ing a story together with Webb. What is also very spe­cial about this book is, that it has draw­ings of some of the char­ac­ters. Colin is an artist and draws for his exhi­bi­tion in Lon­don dur­ing his stay in Amer­ica. These draw­ings he makes in New Cardiff are given to us, so we can see (lit­er­ally) who we are read­ing about.

I can only say: read this highly orig­i­nal book!