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Comfort and Joy

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Comfort and Joy

By: India Knight
Narrated by: Lucy Brown
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About this listen

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of India Knight's darkly comic Comfort and Joy. Read with humour and sensitivity by Lucy Brown, the star of the hit show Primeval.

It's December 23rd and Clara Dunphy is running around Oxford Street like a blue-arsed fly trying to buy presents. She wants to make Christmas perfect: it's a lifelong ambition. And a challenging one at the best of times, even without taking her sixteen guests - sorry, "loved ones" - and their varying degrees of social dysfunction into account. Meanwhile, something weird has happened to her marriage, and the ho, ho, ho is thin on the ground.

Why does Christmas have such an emotional hold over us? Why does family stuff hit the peak of its madness on December the 25th? And is it okay to want more than you have, when what you have seems so enviable from the outside?

A blackly funny, tender dissection of the meaning of love - family love, sibling love, children love - Comfort and Joy will make you laugh and cry.

 Christian Living Christianity Dark Humour Family Life Genre Fiction Holidays Literature & Fiction Comedy Christmas Winter

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Critic reviews

Breathless, ­colourful, hilarious and honest; the dialogue is sitcom-snappy and the opening scenes in Oxford Street positively Joycean (Wendy Holden)
So kindly and funny and affectionate that you could probably warm your hands on it. Miraculously, this is a feel-good story that manages not to be saccharine. There are a great many good jokes here . . . but concealed amid the fun, like silver coins in a Christmas pudding, is a serious theme. This is a book you could safely give to practically anyone. Snap up plenty of copies to hand around under the tree
I loved Comfort and Joy, a hilarious, bawdy yet touching portrait of Christmas over three years (Jilly Cooper)
Fabulous. Laugh-out-loud funny, moving and as cuddly as Santa Claus, this is perfect for snuggling up with over the Christmas holidays
Touching...it will make you laugh, maybe make you cry and keep you reading past bedtime (Lauren Laverne)
A wickedly funny, painfully honest look at families, festivities and romantic love
Tender, tough, schmaltzy, witty and heart-warming all at once. Knight has a great comic touch - there are some wonderfully rude bits and a fantastic rant about the ridiculous expectations piled on 21st-century women to be perfect - and writes with a deceptive lightness. At the heart of this funny, affectionate novel is an acknowledgement that families, like love, come in odd shapes and sizes, and that both matter more than anything
Witty enough to make you laugh out loud, but there are moments of real emotion that keep the book from being too light
A superb ear for dialogue...wonderfully comic
Riotously high in laughs and glamour. I defy a festive grump not to be cheered by it
All stars
Most relevant
Performance helps, but the story is so smugly virtue signalling it makes for a grating listen.

Painfully smug

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there are some genuinely funny moments, and a couple of good anthropological observations, but the characters and narrator are so smug that i struggled through this book

annoying

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The story is good, but I feel it is not enhanced by such frequent use of swear words. I am far from being a prude and I think the younger generation feel they invented these words - wrong! Use of profanity is ok if it enhances the story, but over use detracts from it and some are used to shock.

Why all the bad language?

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Maybe it’s the timing: reading this whilst the UK is still in the grips of the post covid financial turmoil but really I stopped feeling sympathetic towards the protagonist and her family / love dilemmas as soon as she started splashing wads of cash about on vulgar china cats and bespoke bottles of Chanel scent that weren’t even enjoyed by the recipients. The sisters and mother are even more irritating : snobbish posho’s who amble about in a state of upper class twattery meant to be charming but toe curlingly irritating.
‘The Truffle’!! Urrrgh!!!
I got as far as the third Christmas spent in a villa in Morroco, where mother Hut loudly condemns the great unwashed in airports, when I lost the will to subject myself to any more. I think we are meant to feel affection and humour towards these idiots. If you want a more acerbic dissection of the upper middle class; Julian Fellows did it better in Snobs.

Annoying characters with first world problems

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It’s a little pretentious but it’s funny and heart warming. A happy read and Christmassy.

Comfortable and joyous

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