Never Drive a Hatchback to Austria (And Other Valuable Life Lessons)

Life's funny: one month you're trying to work out how to buy a second-hand car without getting screwed over by some dodgy con artist, the next you're plotting your escape from fanatically neurotic housemates. One year you're living in small-town Oxfordshire, the next you're a bewildered new citizen of Vienna. In this meandering meditation on the chance happenings, mindless annoyances and general ridiculousness of modern existence, R.A. Dalkey tells the true tale of five homes, three jobs, two wildly different countries and one superannuated Peugeot 306. If being a grown-up were as simple as holding down a job, buying a reliable car, finding the home of your dreams and living happily ever after, there'd be no need for this book. But the author's unorthodox approach and complete failure to accept the world of adulthood was never going to make it that straightforward. Set against the backdrop of his ever-swelling mid-thirties grumpiness and the growing realization that he might never actually become a millionaire, this story follows him and his trusty hatchback from England to Vienna-a journey that takes him to Cyprus and Venice, Slovenia and Surrey, Belgium and Bonn.