Books by Tim Dowling

Giles Wareing has started telling people he's forty, even though he's actually thirty-nine years and eleven months. It's supposed to help him conquer the fear, but in fact he has only given the fear a four-week head start. Giles is a freelance writer of amusing articles for a national newspaper. One day, feeling particularly fortyish, he happens to type 'Giles Wareing+unfunny' into a search engine. And that's when he discovers the thread. The thread is called 'The Giles Wareing Haters' Club', and is entirely devoted to holding everything he has ever written up to excoriating criticism and ridicule. As Giles becomes obsessed with the thread, with tracking down its participants, his angst begins to focus on one particularly scornful contributor, and it soon becomes clear that things are going really quite badly wrong . . . A tragedy, a farce and a detective story, The Giles Wareing Haters' Club is an absorbing, hilarious and razor-sharp look at the modern male in all his dysfunctional glory. 'Entertaining and unexpectedly poignant' Times Literary Supplement 'Very funny . . .Cringe comedy at its best' GQ 'An acerbically dry and hilarious tale' InStyle

The much-loved Guardian columnist asks what it takes to make a husband, and looks to his own married life to provide the answer.**Anything resembling advice should be taken at reader's own risk.You'll never get divorced if you never get married. Not even your granny minds if you live in sin anymore. And if you're single you can choose curtains without somebody else butting in. So why bother with marriage? It can't just be an easy way round having to buy your own deodorant.Guardian columnist Tim Dowling is a husband of some twenty years. His marriage is resounding proof that even the most impossible partnership can work out for the best. Some of the time.So while this book is called 'How To be a Husband', it's not really a how-to guide at all. Nor is it a compendium of petty remarks and brinkmanship - although it contains plenty of both. You may pick up a few DIY hints. You might learn that while marriage is founded on love, it endures through bloody hard work. Most likely it will make you whimper with the laughter of painful recognition.'How To be a Husband' is a cautionary tale about throwing caution to the wind. It's the strange romance of two people consenting to share a roll-on. It's a new manifesto for marriage and an answer to why, even when we suck at it, we stick at it.