REVIEWS FOR RING ROAD: 'A Tristram Shandy for our times... The tone is part elegy, part satire, part howl and very, very funny. I laughed more times than I can remember over a novel for years ... Ring Road is well-observed and endlessly inventive, with all the messiness of a real place. Sansom's deadpan voice throws up jokes on every page.' Observer 'Calls to mind two other outstanding novels: Tristram Shandy...and Joseph Heller's Catch-22... One of those rare books that, once picked up, proves very difficult to put down.' The Irish Independent 'Wonderfully vivid, easy, natural, funny and moving.' Oliver Sacks 'A wonderfully comic novel.' Daily Mail 'It reminds me most of Jerome K. Jerome... Mellow, intelligent and very funny, a perfect antidote for melancholy.' Michael Moorcok, Guardian 'There is something fearless in the gaze Sansom turns on banality, and this novel is, in the end, a surprisingly gripping feat of coming to terms with what ordinary life is like.' TLS

Ian Sansom reviews regularly for the Guardian and the London Review of Books. His first book, The Truth About Babies, was published by Granta in 2002, and his second, Ring Road, by Fourth Estate in 2004.