The Death of Bunny Munro

✍ Scribed by Nick Cave

• Publisher: Faber & Faber;Canongate
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 132 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0865479402

✦ Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly

The protagonist of Cave's pleasantly demented second novel, set in England, is living out a porno: door-to-door lotion salesman Bunny Munro spends his days seducing invariably attractive women, servicing both their sexual and moisturizing needs. His wife's suicide, though, threatens to derail Bunny's amorous adventures, as he can't shake the feeling that he might somehow be responsible. Another new obstacle is the need to look after his nine-year-old son, Bunny Jr. In an effort to escape the creepiness of the apartment he shared with his wife, Bunny takes his son on the road, teaching him the ropes of salesmanship. Meanwhile, a man in red face paint and plastic devil horns accosts women in northern England before a murderous turn sends him journeying south. Bunny's deterioration from swaggering Lothario to sputtering pity case suggests he is carrying around more guilt than he cares to admit, and his obsessive behavior, while a bit of a stretch, allows for an interesting portrait of modern family dynamics. Cave's bawdy humor, along with a gallows whimsy that will be familiar to fans of his music, elevate the novel from what might otherwise be a one-note adventure. (Sept.)
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Review

"Put Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka, and Benny Hill together in a Brighton seaside guesthouse, and they might just come up with Bunny Munro. As it stands, though, this novel emerges emphatically as the work of one of the great cross-genre storytellers of our age; a compulsive read possessing all of Nick Caves trademark horror and humanity, often thinly disguised in a galloping, playful romp. Irvine Welsh

"_The Death of Bunny Munro_, is a sexually explicit, hyperactive soap opera of a book that proves, once again, that his talents are wide-ranging. Cave is a darkly gifted storyteller . . . Cave's prose surprises throughout with flashes of grotesque beauty." Don Waters, _San Francisco Chronicle

_"As in song, Cave the novelist is unafraid to launch headlong into roaring caricature, but while the sex and death quotient is significant, the book also reveals surprising new weapons in his armoury, particularly the tenderness and humanity with which he portrays Bunny Junior, a beacon of love and faith in a ruined world . . . Told with verve, studded with scalding humour." Graeme Thomson, The Observer