Penguins Stopped Play: Eleven Village Cricketers Take on the World - Couverture souple

Praise for Harry Thompson and Penguins Stopped Play: (.)

'A comic gem.' (Ultratravel)

'Actually completely brilliant' (Ian Hislop)

'Hilarious' (Sunday Telegraph)

'A real gold standard sense of humour' (David Baddiel)

'Rare, clever, creative ... a maverick, pushing boundaries with outrageous jokes' (Guardian)

'The first chapter deserves to be anthologised alongside the funniest passages of cricket writing in the game's rich literary history, and what follows is crammed with sharp observation, comic and cruel characterisation and a great many very good jokes...It is a gloriously funny and life-affirming book, and if you know anyone who plays cricket and can read you should buy it for them' - Andrew Baker (Daily Telegraph)

'Surely the funniest book ever written about the English addiction to cricket...a beautiful tale of classic British humour, self-deprecation, great courage and one of the best accounts ever of the obsessive appeal of our summer game to those whose lives revolve around it' - Tom Rosenthal (Daily Mail)

'Engaging and full of humour, though it ends with an abrupt shift in tone when Thompson discovers that he has inoperable lung cancer' - Ludovic Hunter-Tilney (FT magazine)

'As funny as you would expect from the (sadly deceased) writer of Have I Got News For You' (Daily Express)

It seemed a simple enough idea at the outset: to assemble a team of eleven men to play cricket on each of the seven continents of the globe. Except - hold on a minute - that's not a simple idea at all. And when you throw in incompetent airline officials, amorous Argentine Colonels' wives, cunning Bajan drug dealers, gay Australian waiters, overzealous American anti-terrorist police, idiot Welshmen dressed as Santa Claus, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and whole armies of pitch-invading Antarctic penguins, you quickly arrive at a whole lot more than you bargained for.

Harry Thompson's hilarious book tells the story of one of those great idiotic enterprises that only an Englishman could have dreamed up, and only a bunch of Englishmen could possibly have wished to carry out.