Entertaining Strangers made me laugh. If you are interested in landladies, eccentrics, philosophers, bad families, music, degenerates, and ants, Jonathan Taylor's entertaining and illuminating novel will make you laugh too. -- Kate Pullinger ... gripping tale of deeply strange and obsessive characters, funny and horrifying, great read. -- Michele Hanson Original, strange, funny, profound. -- Louis De Bernieres

Shortlisted for the 2013 East Midlands Book Award

Entertaining Strangers is a tragi-comedy about the eccentric Edwin Prince – a depressive intellectual obsessed with high culture and ants – and the mysterious, homeless narrator Jules, who gradually unravels Edwin’s impossible relationships with his landlady, neurotic mother, psychotic brother, domineering ex-wife, dead grandfather and, above all, his ant-farm. At the same time, Jules continually experiences traumatic memories full of fire and water, and gradually a terrible pre-history emerges from beneath all of the other stories, which seems somehow to shape both Jules’s fiery dreams and Edwin’s obsessions – a great fire, massacre and one girl's drowning in Smyrna, 75 years earlier.

"

Taylor achieves a heartfelt yet unsentimental memoir that is also a reconciliation.

"

Riveting, detailed, moving account of his father’s Parkinson’s, mysterious past, and his own response to it.

"

Somehow Taylor has created a penniless, snobbish autodidact who’s completely adorable. Prince is the kind of character who comes along once in a lifetime, the kind who echoes in your thoughts for days after reading. The initial absurdity of his preoccupation with ants (and the ensuing repetition of the word ‘ants’, unleashing laughs which I thought I’d reserved exclusively for Stewart Lee) develops into a more profound leitmotif and ultimately a poignant symbol of his self-destructiveness. The line between tragedy and comedy is redrawn in satisfyingly unexpected ways.

"

Entertaining Strangers is probably one of the more creative and original novels I've ever read. It's definitely an intellectual's book: one clever and gigantic allegory full of surprises, and an abundance of intriguing information about ants.