Richard Ayoade has written a new novel, about his fictional quest to rescue Harauld Hughes – a practically mythical mid-century playwright – from obscurity.
The premise is that the comedian and actor chanced upon a book called The Two-Hander Trilogy by Harauld Hughes in a second-hand bookshop.
‘At first startled by his uncanny resemblance to the author's photo, he opened the volume and was electrified,’ reads the blurb: ‘Terse, aggressive, and elliptical, what was true of Ayoade was also true of Hughes's writing, which encompassed stage, screen, and some of the shortest poems ever published.’
‘Ayoade embarked on a documentary, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, to understand the unfathomable collapse of Hughes's final film O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, taking us deep inside the most furious British writer since the Boer War. This is the story of the story of that quest.’
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes will be published by Faber & Faber on October 3, featuring a quote from Stephen Merchant on the cover describing it as ‘Nabokov meets Spinal Tap’.
The audiobook edition is read by Ayoade and also stars Noel Fielding, Lydia Fox, Sally Hawkins, Merchant, David Mitchell and Chris Morris, with music by Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner.
The book will be launched with an event at London’s South Bank Centre on October 1 with Ayoade in conversation with novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne.
This is not the corduroy-loving comic’s first brush with doppelgängers, having directed the 2013 black comedy film The Double based upon Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1846 novella of the same name and starring Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska.
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is available from Amazon, priced £16.99 in hardback, £8.99 on Kindle or £7.99 as an audiobook – – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.
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