Good omens

by Neil Gaiman

Paper Book, 1990

Genres

Fantasy

All Topics

Fiction

General Fiction

Collection

Your library

Description

Fantasy. Fiction. Science Fiction. Humor (Fiction.) HTML: Winner of the Audiophile Magazine Earphones Award. The classic collaboration from the internationally bestselling authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, soon to be an original series starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant. "Good Omens . . . is something like what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins and Don DeLillo had collaborated. Lots of literary inventiveness in the plotting and chunks of very good writing and characterization. It's a wow. It would make one hell of a movie. Or a heavenly one. Take your pick."�??Washington PostAccording to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon�??both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle�??are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist .… (more)

Media reviews

The Washington Post

The book tackles things most science fiction and fantasy writers never think about, much less write. It does it in a straightforward manner. It's about Predestination and Free Will, about chaos and order, about human beings, their technology and their belief systems. When the book is talking about

the big questions, it's a wow. It leaves room in both the plot and the reader's reactions for the characters to move around in and do unexpected but very human things.

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New York Times

''Good Omens'' is a direct descendant of ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,'' a vastly overpraised book or radio program or industry or something that became quite popular in Britain a decade ago when it became apparent that Margaret Thatcher would be in office for some time and that laughs

were going to be hard to come by... Obviously, it would be difficult to write a 354-page satirical novel without getting off a few good lines. I counted four... But to get to this material, the reader must wade through reams and reams of undergraduate dreck: recycled science-fiction cliches about using the gift of prophesy to make a killing in the stock market; shopworn jokes about American television programs (would you believe the book includes a joke about ''Have Gun, Will Travel''?); and an infuriating running gag about Queen, a vaudevillian rock group whose hits are buried far in the past and should have been buried sooner.

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Publishers Weekly

When a scatterbrained Satanist nun goofs up a baby-switching scheme and delivers the infant Antichrist to the wrong couple, it's just the beginning of the comic errors in the divine plan for Armageddon which this fast-paced novel by two British writers zanily details... Some humor is strictly

British, but most will appeal even to Americans "and other aliens."

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