Love in the Time of Fridges »

Tim Scott graduated from Cambridge University, England, and decided to use his hard fought education to work a plasterer, decorator and delivery driver.

He writing career began with a training video which warned office staff that falling over could be dangerous. He then went on to write and appear on BBC Radio 4 in around fifty comedy half hours—and finally ended up being given his own late night comedy television series on network ITV. It ran for twenty six episodes and was so surreal that even Ionesco or Salvador Dali would have been shaking their heads in confusion.

He has written a large number of children's books, and also for children's television. He more recently became a television director and in 2003 won a BAFTA for co writing and directing a children's series, "Ripley and Scuff," for the BBC. He likes to travel around the world, often in search of surf.

Tim Scott’s Outrageous Fortune marked the debut of one of the most wildly inventive writers to hit the sci-fi scene in years. Now he returns with a hilarious yet poignant novel of love, loss, and itinerant appliances.

“New Seattle Health and Safety. Do not die for no reason.” This is the motto of a city so obsessed with the danger of sharp corners that it has almost forgotten how to live. But Huckleberry Lindbergh is about to find his trip to the city most decidedly unsafe. For a chance encounter leads him into the heart of a dark conspiracy. And in order to stop it, this former cop is about to do something so unsafe—so monumentally stupid—that its reverberations will be felt all the way to the Pentagon.

Soon he is on the run from more authorities than he has had hot meals, his staunchest allies a bunch of feral fridges that give new meaning to the words “chill out.” But sometimes a dose of chaos is just what the doctor ordered, and Huck’s quest to remain among the living teaches not only him but those around him the true meaning of survival . . . in all its forms.

Publishers Weekly

Scott (Outrageous Fortune) sets his absurdist sophomore effort in near future New Seattle, where ex-cop Huckleberry Lindbergh has just returned after eight years away. Huck and his old friend Gabe are soon drawn to Nena, a woman who reminds Gabe sharply of his long-lost love, Abigail. Huck and Nena are chased, caught and chased again through the weird life of New Seattle, which is overseen by the Health and Safety Department under Mayor Dan Cicero's "zero-tolerance policy on danger." Amid constant lectures on implausible hazards, they struggle to uncover the mayor's machinations and help a cluster of talking refrigerators hide their conspiracy from the cops. Accelerating mad action and vivid, cleverly written glimpses of bystanders contrast sharply with the weak female characters: despite their all-seeing and revealing eyes, the two women rarely shift beyond plot objects, and the talking fridges have more personality. (Aug.)

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