This is a crazy caper of a story. i enjoyed it a lot and thought it was funny, bordering on the ridiculous. Definitely worth a read

Good holiday read, light and amusing. Book took my mind off virus for a while which can only be good. Story of family upheaval. Parents George and Rosie fall out and he seeks solace from Brenda who lives next door. Children Sid and Cassie both face challenges in their personal lives. Bank fraud, theft and unsavory characters keep the novel bouncing along..

The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid is the second novel by Marina Lewycka. If you have read and enjoyed A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian you are going to love this.

George is approaching his 80th birthday, he has left his wife Rosie after an argument over Brexit on referendum night and is living with their next door neighbour Brenda. He seems to have won the jackpot on the Kosovan lottery but he isn’t sure that he entered the lottery and he can’t remember the password to his bank account to access the money. What follows is hysterical chaos as different money laundering gangs are desperately trying to gain access to George’s bank account and Rosie and Brenda are battling over George’s wandering affections.

This is charming, funny and well observed. Highly recommended

I love this author and always have. She’s funny and engaging and I always find myself getting dawn into her work quickly. This is another gem.

George Pantis is a very clever man, a philosophy lecturer, but he is also really quite dim. Not because he voted for Brexit, or because he has walked out on his remain-voting wife Rosie, or even because he has then moved in with Brenda, the UKIP supporting hairdresser next door – he is foolish because he forgets, among many things, that he is nearly eighty. He is also a little silly, because he believes the woman who phones to congratulate him on winning a fortune in a Kosovan lottery (which he doesn’t actually remember entering, but his daftness takes a dark turn when he is then convinced into running off to a remote Albanian village by convincing himself that a beautiful young woman might be attracted to his new-found riches. In fact, he has fallen into a trap set by a thoroughly nasty set of confidence tricksters (and human organ traffickers) and our fun really starts when both George’s wife, his lover Brenda and his long-suffering son, Sid, set off to rescue him. Obviously, chaos ensues before George and his family can find their way back to their home in Sheffield – but will Sid’s sensible attitude win out and will George stay with Brenda or go back to his wife?

A bit of light entertainment for these rather complicated times? Sounds like a plan….

The blurb made it sound fun, and I did like Marina Lewycka's first novel, but this was so disappointingly bad. The humour wasn't funny and so broad it felt like a dumb sitcom, the satire is unimaginative, the characters uninteresting, and the feeble plot never engaging. It actually started out ok and then quickly descended past mediocrity into dullness where it settled for the rest of the book. There is a good, fun novel about Brexit out there and it's Jonathan Coe's Middle England, not this forgettable effort from a writer I thought was better.

George Pantis voted to leave Brexit and he split with his wife over it. Now in a relationship with Brenda, the forceful woman next door, George is beginning to regret things. When he apparently wins a fortune on a Kosovan lottery he barely remembers entering he suddenly finds that he is getting lots of mail and telephone calls. Sensible SID, his son, tells him it is a scam and not to divulge his password to anyone, that's fine because George can't remember it himself.
Lewycka is one of my favourite writers but I have to be in the right mood to read her and I expect that is the same for many potential readers. Lewycka's books are madcap romps with wildly exaggerated characters and a wicked sense of humour. Here a complex slapstick plot involving money laundering, eastern european mafia etc is set in Sheffield and pulls in lots of references to Brexit. If one allows oneself to go with the flow it is just a hilarious tale!

I love the author's other books, so I was not disappointed with this new one. It was fun, well-written story with a nice cast of characters. I enjoyed my time a lot.
Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

I read a lot of good reviews about this author and I was more than happy to get this ARC.
It was a good and fun read, well written and entertaining.
I liked the well thought cast of character, the humour and the excellent style of writing.
I had fun and appreciated the story, recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

A love triangle with gangsters? Not a good idea.'

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Good, the Bad, and the Little Bit Stupid via NetGalley.

Unusually, Lewycka opens this book with a couple of pages setting the scene and - apparently - telling us how to approach the characters.There are George and Rosie Pantis. George, aged 79 and retired as a philosophy lecturer to write poetry (no poetry occurs). Rosie, twenty years younger and still working as a teacher to support him. Poseidon (Sid) and Cassiopeia (Cassie), their children. Sid's partner, Jacquie, pregnant and very patient with Rosie's grumbles about George. Brenda, with whom George is now living. The intro swiftly sums up the background - George's defection on that fateful night in June 2016, first to Leave in the Referendum and then to Brenda, the looming threat of financial fraud and the assurance that this isn't a book where good and bad get their just desserts and that there aren't actually any good guys here, just people with mixed up motives and different sides to them.

While useful in orienting us to the characters and where they are, I found this synopsis a little surprising and part of me, throughout the book, was ruminating on it, trying to see whether I agreed or not. Was it meant to be taken seriously? Was it a bit of sly misdirection? I'm still not sure whether that was the intended effect although I have to say it probably made me pay closer attention and That can't be a bad thing.

Indeed, close attention is merited because in discussing Rosie, George, Brenda and the rest, Lewycka is - overtly - dissecting the Brexity turmoil of the past three years in Britain. One can almost assign roles. Brenda is Leave - strident, proudly non PC. Rosie is Remain - disappointed, puzzled and, increasingly, angry. George is perhaps Everyman - tilting Leave at the last minute but for reasons that depart from the official script. And Sid, Jacquie and Cassie are, Sid muses, those who will have to put things back together in the future years and decades.

On this reading, though, Lewycka isn't even-handed but makes it clear she thinks George is a fool. The overt plot in this book focuses on a complicated piece of identity theft which draws him in. It's a far from obvious scam which involves several different factions and has some genuinely funny moments, but despite this it's clear there is something fishy going on. It is hard not to join the dots to interpret George's Leave vote as a the result of another complex scam (aided perhaps by the book's title) so - despite that intro - I think we know where we are in terms of Brexit Britain.

All that said, there is a great deal more to this book, a lot of gentle comedy laced with misunderstandings (all round), jealousy (between Brenda and Rosie) and incompetence (the scamming crooks who are onto George). And I think Lewycka does well giving voice to the sense of hurt that many of us have ('It's the closeness of the result, it's the feeling of being cheated, it's the sense that the other side it being wilfully stupid and just doesn't understand the issue...')

It has heart, too, as Sid ponders his future relationship with Jacquie and their child. I found this very moving - Sid and Jacquie are well drawn characters, Sid, a maths lecturer, with 'Noether's theorem in his mind' (Emmy Noether deserves wider recognition!), Jacquie who is 'such a sympathetic listener that Rosie prefers talking to her, rather than to Sid...' They would, perhaps, be easy to overlook give all the hullabaloo from the others. And after a lot of setup in the opening three quarters, the book shifts up a few gears and gives us quite a different ending from what we might expect. In doing that, things suddenly move very fast, with the book covering - literally a great deal of ground in relatively few pages. I'd have welcomed more time, and detail, in this section.

There is some great, sly writing hereg: a song sung, with variations, by, among other groups 'Angela and the Muttis' and 'The Blue-Eyed Barnier Boy', the description of a certain politician: 'He's a dangerous demagogue, with his populist posturing and and mendacious mouth grinning open like a frog waiting too catch some innocent fly with his fast flicking tongue.' (Who COULD it be?). 'What is national identity', we are asked rhetorically, 'but victimhood with boots on?' More earthily - here is a kiss: 'Her lips taste of secrecy and forest chestnuts...'

As much a commentary on contemporary Britain - well, England - as Lewycka's previous books, this is a thoroughly good read. Perhaps the intro reflects the impossibility of trying to exist - to live or two write - in our current climate without taking a position while at the same time being told to get over it, move forward, unify, something which seems impossible and has to be cast forward to future generations.

I’ve seen this described as ‘laugh out loud’, I found it quietly but inescapably amusing.

We follow the story of George, about to hit his 80th birthday, and the chaos his life descends into when he becomes the naïve victim of a money laundering scam… Convinced he’s won the Kosovan lottery, and with £7m in his bank account, George is now parted from his wife, shacked up with the next door neighbour, and suddenly on his way to Eastern Europe beside a very glamourous young lady.

Completely absurd and ridiculous, with all the chaos stacked up in a short timeline, this is amusing and droll. A fun cast of characters – George himself, Rosie his lovable but barking wife, Brenda ‘the Bitch’ from next door, Sid and Cassie – George’s children, and a supporting cast of Eastern Europeans with a wealth of changing identities. Add in some boats, trains, storms, guns, the black market in human kidneys, and Brexit and that’s a whole lot of amusement. I would love to see this on television.

I am fond of Marina Lewycka's books and adored her massive best seller A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and she followed it up well with The Lubetkin Legacy and Two Caravans which were well written and thoughtful as well as fun.

Her new book is a farce and a fun filled romp where she does not shy away from difficult subjects and adds Brexit, fraud, internet banking and the problems of old age.

I enjoyed it and also loved her vivid imagination and use of words.

She is not just a comedienne but a serious writer tacking serious matters but she is never afraid to use humour to make her points.

George Pantis - a proud Brexiteer that can't wait to 'have his country back' gets locked out by his pro-European wife Rosie on the night of the referendum, which causes him to walk over to their neighbour Brexit-Brenda and start an affair with her. A few days later he wins millions on a Kosovan lottery he only vaguely remembers entering - it seems like this is his lucky year!

What a lovely start to a novel!

As a European living in the UK - and as someone who loved Marina Lewycka's novels Two Caravans and We are All Made of Glue - I was curious about this novel and could not wait to check it out.

I have to admit though, that it was a massive disappointment for me.

The characters are caricatures of themselves (I will admit though that they get more endearing as the book goes on), the dialogues seem to be taken directly from a tabloid magazine and the plot is just getting more and more ridiculous and unbelievable as the book goes on.

I am aware that all of my above statement do not necessarily make a bad novel, but I just did not get into the story at all - and maybe it is just not my sense of humour.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes an easy and entertaining beach read and cannot stress enough how much I would recommend We are All Made of Glue to everyone :)

I really wanted to love this book and it started off quite well as most of the humour was on my wavelength. But then, as the story went on (meandering around rather than really getting anywhere) the disjointed nature of reminiscences slapped in the middle of scenes started to really jar on me and the book lost its flow for me somewhat in the early stages. I carried on as I really wanted to see if we eventually got there and was rewarded with some cracking one liners, social & political observations, and scenes that really made me laugh out loud. Sadly these were interspersed with more banal and a bit cringeworthy humour and some of the well set up scenes degenerated too far into the realms of farce. I'm a big fan of Bonkers as a genre but even I have my limits.
All that said, I did like Sid (or Poseidon as he was christened) as he was pretty much the straight man to the comedy that was going on around him.
All in all, sorry but I think this really wasn't the book for me... My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

I thought that the description of this book sounded interesting and amusing. I've not read any previous books by this author, but had heard a lot of good reviews about her previous books. When I was offered an opportunity to review this book from Netgalley and the Publisher, I decided to read it.
The characters and the storyline were a little too farcical for me. They were more than a little bit stupid, as the title suggests that they are.
The characters and events are definitely caricatured, and there are comical and amusing elements to the book. It was easy to read, but for me, I did not enjoy it as much as I expected to.

I was very disappointed in The Good, The Bad And The Little Bit Stupid. I thought Marina Lewycka’s last book, The Lubetkin Legacy was excellent – witty, sharply observed and penetrating in its analysis. This is nothing like as good.

The story is set in immediate post-referendum Yorkshire where the Pantis family have been riven by Brexit arguments and where fraud of all kinds is evident. This includes fake insurance claims, dodgy “lottery wins”, claims made in the referendum campaign and so on, as the ageing Pantis parents split up and their children, especially Sensible Sid, try to cope with the changes in their lives. I’m afraid I found it thoroughly unconvincing and just plain dull much of the time. Lewycka can still come out with a ringing phrase, like one character describing another as “that useless leeching lump of self-regard,” but in spite of good prose I found the characters pretty thin caricatures and the whole thing felt rather familiar and as though I’d read about it before. There are some farcical “comic” scenes which were plain silly rather than comic, and so on. I’m afraid I just gave up around half way, which is unusual for me, but I just didn’t care any more.

I’m sorry to be critical of an author whose work I have enjoyed in the past, but this one really didn’t do it for me.

(My thanks to Penguin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

The Good, the Bad, and the Little Bit Stupid is a short, pacey read. Like Marina Lewycka's other books, seemingly ordinary domestic events - in this case, a man (George) having a late-life crisis where he has an affair with a neighbour (Brenda), leaves his wife (Rosie), and falls for a cyber scam - lead to much more, snowballing into an out-of-control situation where several characters end up in a shoot-out on an island off Albania.

As is her trademark, Lewycka provides lots of amusing observations on the absurdity of 21st-century life and there are some real laugh-out-loud moments. She also makes good points about how people cling harder to their beliefs when presented with contrary facts, and how Britain seems to be irreconcilably divided as a result of the Brexit referendum. While most of the characters have stereotypes at their base, I nonetheless was able to sympathise with and relate to the neurotic, unfulfilled Millennial characters Sid and Cassie, and recognised elements of Boomers I know in Rosie in particular.

There were times where I felt events were handled a little too light-heartedly; the characters seem relatively unscathed by their terrifying ordeal, and there are a couple of jarring minor events I feel served little purpose and could have been edited out to make a smoother and more cohesive whole. I couldn't fathom what Rosie and Brenda saw in George, especially after his stupidity nearly got them killed - perhaps, like her Brexiteer neighbour, Rosie is immune to evidence that George isn't that great! I also found the use of present tense and the usually short chapters that facilitated frequent changes of point of view a bit dizzying sometimes.

Although The Good, the Bad, and the Little Bit Stupid isn't my favourite book from this author, it nonetheless contains the elements of her writing that I love, and if you're looking for a quick, light-hearted read, you can't really go wrong by giving it a go.

A novel about Brexit written by an author of European origins was always going to be of interest. Of course, even by the title, you know what side of the fence Marina Lewycka sits on.

It was an easy read with a lot of caricature-based humour which verges on seaside postcard at times, so it was a surprise that there was subtlety and an attempt to understand all sides of the argument within the story.
Following the referendum husband and wife, Rosie and George, fall out due to opposing votes and they separate. George, quoting soundbites from the right-wing media and on the rebound, takes up with UKIP supporter Brenda, whose dislike of all things foreign doesn't extend to food or holidays. George's reasons for voting for Brexit differ to Brenda's and he counters some of her more outrageous attitudes and statements culled from Farage. For George it was all about EU rules and taking back control, for Brenda it was about immigration. There is a farcical tale of money-laundering and kidney black market operations in Albania, but this is just the backdrop to the interactions between these characters and whether there can be any reconciliation.

The conclusion is that sometimes "differences can be irreconcilable because the differences are not about the facts. It's because they are different people with different upbringings, different experiences, different outlooks on life and different ideas of what is right and wrong. No amount of information, true of false, is going to alter that."
Hope is expressed that future generations, who were not involved, will come together and heal any rifts.

Enjoyed it as much as her previous books with a story about greed, stupidity, love and betrayal, criminals and Brexit. Laughed a lot.

I was expecting another good read from Marina, but sadly this didn’t happen. It’s an easy read, but with a story line that was just pure farce most of the time. The content is all relevant - brexit ( if you want to read anymore about the subject, I don’t!), fraudulent activity that involves scamming people for their bank account details, and the sale/ selling of human kidneys.

Just far too fetched for me, Shame.