Michael

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Michael is dead. He is fairly confident about this. He has had a big life, plenty of abundance and a good deal of applause, and now it is over and somebody is offering him a way back. There is a catch, of course. He does not get to choose where he lands, and where he lands is the year he spent the rest of his life trying not to think about.

His dad has died. He and his mum have had to start again from nothing: new house, new school, not a single friend. And his mum has a new boyfriend, a man with suspiciously close-set eyes and the word DRYWALL tattooed along his forearm.

A second run at the worst year

The boy Michael comes back as does what a lot of boys in that position do, which is disappear upstairs. He stays in his bedroom drawing cars and building Airfix models, waiting for the year to be over. From the inside there is no version of this that ends well.

The premise is doing something clever underneath the comedy. We already know Michael's life turned out large and loud, so the tension is not whether he survives the year. It is watching him fail to notice the things that are quietly saving him while they are happening. Anyone who has looked back at a bad stretch and realised it was the making of them will recognise the trick immediately.

Mr Graham next door

What changes it is not a dramatic event. It is a couple of new friendships and a neighbour called Mr Graham, who is kind to him for no particular reason and without making a performance of it. Months pass, and Michael slowly finds a place for himself.

That is the territory Bob Mortimer has been mining in prose for years now, and he is better at it than his day job would suggest. He writes small kindnesses without sentimentality, and he writes lonely people without pity, which is a harder combination than it looks. The publisher calls it wise, funny and moving, and on the evidence of his previous novels that is not just a jacket line.

The line the book keeps coming back to is that life looks different second time around. It is a comic novel about grief, essentially, which is a thing Mortimer can get away with because nobody suspects him of trying to be profound.

Mortimer reads it, which is the point

Simon and Schuster Audio UK have him narrating his own book, unabridged, at a round ten hours. For this author that is not a nice extra, it is close to essential. The Teesside delivery, the timing, the way he can make a sentence turn funny on the last word: those are the reason people bought his previous books in audio rather than print.

It also matters for the sad half of the story. A professional narrator would have to decide how much to lean on the grief. Mortimer, reading a novel about a boy losing his father, tends to underplay exactly where someone else would push, and that is usually when he lands it. The recording is not out yet, so take that as a note on the pairing rather than a verdict on the performance.

The comedian who turned out to be a novelist

Most people met Bob Mortimer through Vic Reeves Big Night Out and thirty years of surreal comedy with Vic Reeves, or more recently through Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing on BBC Two. The writing came later and by accident. A heart condition diagnosed in 2015 forced emergency surgery, cancelled a tour and left him taking stock, and the result was And Away..., his 2021 memoir, which became the bestselling memoir of the year.

Then came the fiction. The Satsuma Complex in 2022 sold a million copies and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. Its sequel The Hotel Avocado went straight to number one in 2024. Michael is his third novel and the first that is not about Gary Thorn, so it is also the first real test of whether the novelist stands up without the characters that made him one.

A dead man gets one more go at the worst year of his childhood, and finds out it was the year that built him. Read by Mortimer himself, that is a very easy recommendation. It is on Audible to pre-order now and the free trial covers it.

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