Reviews

Some reviews from American publications:

Publishers Weekly. See it on their website.

Strange Nervous Laughter Bridget McNulty. St. Martin’s/Dunne, $23.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-312-54434-8
The lives of six people collide in McNulty’s magical realism–infused debut set in the South African city of Durban during the hottest summer on record. Beth, a cashier at a small grocery, is on duty when the store is robbed. She and the two customers, Mdu and Meryl, are unharmed but shaken. Soon after the robbery, Beth—who floats when she’s happy—begins dating Pravesh, an undertaker who can sense death by a tingling at the back of his knees and heat in his ears. Mdu, who can speak to whales, meets Aisha, who’s so caught up in her dreams that reality fails to register. Meryl, an assistant at Guinness World Records, is sent to interview Harry, who is trying to set a world record for eating only green foods. Though the characters fall in and out of love, the novel is not a romance but rather an examination of love, the ways we respond to it and how we delude ourselves about our choices. While the themes may sound weighty, McNulty’s light touch and evocative descriptions of Durban make for an absorbing read. (May)

The American Library Association’s Booklist magazine:

Strange Nervous Laughter by Bridget McNulty.

McNulty’s unapologetically whimsical tale follows the intersecting lives of six eccentric characters as peculiar obsessions, unexpected romances, and isolated lives collide following a random burglary in a local grocery store. One of the more engaging story lines follows the lovelorn Beth, a timid cashier at Handy Green Grocers, who literally floats when she is happy, especially after she becomes surreptitiously enamored of Pravesh, a brooding undertaker with a fetish for toenails and teenage pop stars. Meryl, a tightly wound Guinness Book representative, ferociously guards every emotion until she meets Harry, an idiosyncratic garbageman who steals tips at the local diner and surrounds himself with the discarded items he finds at the dump. The lonely Mdu is content to communicate only with whales until, after the burglary, he meets and falls in love with Aisha, a dreamy orphan whose tears turn into prismatic beads when she sleeps. Set against a sweltering South African summer, McNulty’s heady debut twines her characters’ unusual circumstances as they construct and destruct the joy and displeasure of love’s erratic consequences.

Some reviews from South African publications: