Bad to the Bone - Couverture souple

Waddington transforms his novel into a kind of Frankenstein on wheels ... an exhilarating freewheeler of a novel. --Helen Rumbelow in The Times

Waddington employs a cheerful surrealism to convey the superhuman status of his cyclists and the designer violence of his killer. The encounters with death are funny rather than frightening and the narrator is omnipotent, stylish and amused. Waddington's descriptions of racing, and they are many and enthralling, have the rhythm and intensity of poetry. You're riding with your wheel an inch from the author's, carried along by the surge of the pack, normal life and normal people no more than a muted clamour on the roadside. It's exhilarating stuff. --Joe Cogan in The Independent on Sunday

Part murder-mystery, part cycling thriller, this is a great novel about the commercialisation of the modern sport of cycling. It is very funny, too: full of satirical excesses and bodily goings on. It is also good on the ethics of doping and the way in which professional cyclists are reduced, through the demands of their sport, to what Waddington calls fleshbags of blood and sinew. The usual appetites are suppressed. Everyone just works, eats and sleeps ... Legitimate, maybe, but it is close to vampirism for an honourable profession. --Jon Day's 10 Best Books About Cycling in The Guardian

'Tour de France cycling and drugs. Surely the best insider novel on sport since The Hustler, and delightfully mad along Flann O'Brien lines.' Brian Case in Time Out Books of the Year