Lolito

by Ben Brooks

Overview

Age is just a number…

Lolito is an unconventional love story about a fifteen-year-old boy who finds solace in the arms of a middle-aged woman on the Internet.

Fifteen-year-old Etgar Allison is spending spring break alone in an empty house, when he inadvertently learns that his girlfriend has cheated on him with another boy. Heartbroken and lonely, without parental supervision, he turns to alcohol. Unable to cope with his grief, he looks to the Internet for comfort and lands in an adult chatroom. There he meets Macy, a bored but attractive housewife; flirtatious IMs escalate into cybersex chats and soon Etgar is raiding his savings account for a romantic rendezvous in London. . . What could possibly go wrong?

Ben Brooks’s Lolito is an uncompromising look at the turbulent emotional life of teenage boys, a funny and poignant story that injects raw honesty—and even a little tenderness—into its portrait of a taboo relationship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782111597
Publisher:	Canongate Books
Publication date:	08/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	321 KB

About the Author

Ben Brooks was born in 1992 and lives in Gloucestershire, England. He is the author of five other books Grow Up, Fences, An Island of Fifty, The Kasahara School of Nihilism, and Upward Coast&Sadie. Brooks’s work has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in the Dzanc Best of the Web anthology. He enjoys tea, sleep, and Haruki Murakami.

Editorial Reviews

Funny, witty and addictive, Lolito is a quirky and disturbing ball of energy that will consume readers until they have turned the last page

The List

Both warm and uncompromising, Lolito will be as entertaining for young adults as it is educational for older readers. And if some aspects of the world Brooks inhabits seem alarming, I can't think of a writer I would rather have as my guide

Guardian - Alice O’Keefe

Ben Brooks is a magical imp who pumps out dark nuggets of poetry and makes you snort with laughter

NOEL FIELDING

Brooks is a master of this art

The Times - Helen Rumbelow

Lolito is the funniest, most horrible book I've read in years. I was blown away

NICK CAVE

My God, Brooks is a frightening young talent. In Lolito , he creates a multi-coloured, grubby little world that I'd really hate to read about if I was a parent. Magnetising, funny and disturbing, his prose is infectious and highly addictive. I loved it

TIM KEY

Ben Brooks made me think that I'm glad I was fifteen in 1974 rather than now. I'm not actually that crazy about being fifty-four right now

The Truth About Lies - Jim Murdoch

The most convincing portrayal of the adolescent mind since Vernon God Little

EWAN MORRISON

Grow Up is absolutely knockout - Brooks has the timing of a genius stand-up comic. Top class

RICHARD MILWARD

I love Ben Brooks. And Lolito is really something else. A twisted age-gap love story that is deadpan and grubby and strangely poetic and funny and wrong and also very right. It is like how The Graduate would have ended up if Dustin Hoffman had watched a lot of Loose Women and drank Strongbow and spent too much time on the internet

MATT HAIG

Lolito is the funniest, most horrible book I've read in years. I was blown away.

Nick Cave

I love Ben Brooks. And Lolito is really something else. A twisted age-gap love story that is deadpan and grubby and strangely poetic and funny and wrong and also very right.

The Humans - Matt Haig

Brooks is a master of this art.

The Times

Both warm and uncompromising, Lolito will be as entertaining for young adults as it is educational for older readers. And if some aspects of the world Brooks inhabits seem alarming, I can't think of a writer I would rather have as my guide.

The Guardian

This is a totally convincing portrait of being a wayward teenager now, that only a teenager could have written.

Dazed & Confused

Funny, witty and addictive, Lolito is a quirky and disturbing ball of energy that will consume readers until they have turned the last page. Brooks has created the most authentic teenage voice of the twenty-first century.

List

Lolito manages to be hilarious, thought-provoking, disturbing and ridiculous all at once and again proves that young Brooks is one of the UK’s most promising young writers right now—a possible Irvine Welsh of his generation.

Worcester News

"Lolito is reminiscent of Superbad and Youth in Revolt... Etgar is one of the most compelling teenage voices in contemporary literature, with a seemingly endless capacity for imagination and wit."

Shelf Awareness

"Etgar is painfully self-conscious and self-deprecating; he inhabits that familiar teen mindset where every little thing is the most crucial event in your life, until it’s not anymore, and then it’s sad and funny at the same time. His staccato narration, interspersed with references to pop culture and the Internet, manages to get at genuine teen anxieties while still being hilarious.

New York Daily News - Allison Chopin

Lolito is a credible, often exquisite work sure to court at least a little controversy in its depiction of ageless (im)maturity… Lolito won't ever become a tiny corner forgotten.

The Huffington Post - Declan Tan

If this all sounds like an episode of the British TV show Skins, well, you wouldn’t be wrong…both rely on the affect of grittiness for their appeal while simultaneously featuring teenagers who are as fragile as a Morrissey song.

Electric Literature - Eric Howell

Written in Brooks’s distinctively funny and ennui-infused voice, Lolito is a wildly entertaining narrative about love gone wrong that explores guilt while fully embracing, and exposing in an almost voyeuristic fashion, the dramas, thought processes, deplorable online behaviors, and attitudes of a regular male teenager.

Verbicide Magazine - Gabino Iglesias

Brooks acutely captures what it means to be a 21st-century youth. The seamless inclusion of Facebook statuses and online chats throughout the text captures the hybrid nature of a life lived partially online.

The Financial Times - Dima Alzayat