User:Jerichobandini/Queer Fish in God's Waiting Room

Queer Fish in God’s Waiting Room a novel by Lee Henshaw, was published in 2008. An audio book read by Adrian Pasdar was released in April 2011.

Book description

The book follows the bumbling stoner Liam Kerby as he embarks on three trips around the world with his brother, known as Brother James, and best friend Ed Lover. Their first trip takes the three of them to New York, where they revel in the differences between The Big Apple and their hometown of Macclesfield, a small town in the north of England. In Mexico City they visit a whorehouse and get into a fight with a group of university students. In Caracas, they are joined by Liam's girlfriend, who is referred to throughout the novel as My Claire. Ed Lover is also joined by his Mexican girlfriend, Ursula Paradise. Brother James, however, who is younger and less mature than the others, doesn’t have a girlfriend, which leads to tensions between the travellers as he expects his former companions to continue with their debauched misadventures. This leads to an emotional climax as Liam confronts his brother about his behaviour and mistreatment of My Claire.

Audio book

The Queer Fish in God’s Waiting Room audio book was published by Fruit Tree Books. It was read by Adrian Pasdar, an American film and television star most well-known for his role as Nathan Petrelli in Heroes.

Background

Queer Fish in God’s Waiting Room is semi-autobiographical and as Henshaw states in the introduction to the novel, he wrote it to ask a girl to marry him. Despite featuring subjects such as a ‘blackcurrant bath bong’ and ‘a talking fanny’ the novel is as much a romance as it is a comedy and was successful as a proposal, as explained in the book’s postscript.

As he suggests at the end of the novel, Henshaw borrowed liberally from both good friends and authors such as John Kennedy Toole, Ernest Hemingway and the South American revolutionary Jose Marti for inspiration. Henshaw feels that Ernest Hemingway would be ok with this, based on Hemingway’s view that ‘some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence’, which he presumably would not have excluded himself from.