Redefining Victory — Anthony Stevens

A middle-aged man leaves his wife for a younger woman... or is it to 'find out who he really is'? You've heard it all before, of course - but not like this! REDEFINING VICTORY takes a banal situation and transforms it into something harshly comic, strangely surreal and disconcertingly archetypal. How? By making the characters talk and think entirely in clichés - rather like robots in some future experiment in AI. But the setting is now, and everything in the novel is so familiar - the characters, the situations, the words used - that it becomes paradoxically alien, weird and even, at times, a little grotesque. Both as an entertaining satire on 'middle England' and as a tragicomic vision of the emotional, intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of people whose language does their thinking - and their feeling - for them, REDEFINING VICTORY will make you ask: Do we all (sometimes) mistake the right phrase for the raw truth? And it's a must for anyone who loves the English language, revealing its world-beating richness in clichés, platitudes, euphemisms and hackneyed phrases. You'll be amazed at how many expressions there are that we really ought to avoid!