Changes

|title=The Yips

|sort=Yips

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=978-0007476657

|pages=560

|publisher=Fourth Estate

|date=July 2012

|summary=This is an extraordinary (in a good way) look at a slice of British life with all accompanying poignancy, fun and eccentricity. People you'd like to befriend are placed beside those you'd run miles from in reality but who contribute to a delicious experience.

}}

Stuart Ransom is a golfing has-been and he's the only one who doesn't realise it. If his recollections are anything to go by (and who can tell?) he was on a par with the best. Times have changed though; the handicap isn't what it once was and age and alcohol have taken their toll. However, hope springs eternal and there's always one more match, so perhaps this is it. Meanwhile Gene, who splits his time between working at the hotel in which Stuart is staying and reading electricity meters, encounters an agoraphobic, exotic tattooist. Valentine is a woman struggling with an unhealthily precocious 2 year-old, a brother flirting with criminality and a brain-injured mother who has become more than a little eccentric. Add Gene's wife Rev Sheila and her personal crisis into the mix and it becomes a recipe for disaster, it's just a case of waiting for it to erupt.

2012's Man Booker long list is the mixed bag of styles and subjects we've come to expect. If you want to dip into the diversity then we can heartily recommend many of the 12, including [[The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng]], [[The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce]], [[Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel]] and [[Communion Town by Sam Thompson]].

[[Category:Humour]]