In The Fib, The Swap and The Trick, George Layton's collections of short stories evoke a nostalgic, atmospheric view of growing up in the 1950s. Now published together for the first time as a bind-up The coach started to move off. I felt frightened. All these weeks, looking forward to it, and now I didn't want to go. Please, Mum, let me go home. She was running alongside, waving her hanky and crying . . . He'd nagged his mother for weeks to let him go on the school exchange, swapping his home in the backstreets of a northern town for a posh house in London. With a proper family. With a dad. But now it was all going wrong . . .

I was sick of Gordon Barraclough. Sick of his bullying. And I was sick of him being a good footballer. 'Listen, Barraclough. My uncle is Bobby Charlton.' 'You're a liar.' I was. 'I'm not. Cross my heart and hope to die.' I spat on my hand. If I'd dropped down dead on the spot I wouldn't have been surprised. 'Funny and moving.... a rare gift.' Guardian

In The Fib, The Swap and The Trick, George Layton's collections of short stories evoke a nostalgic, atmospheric view of growing up in the 1950s. Now published together for the first time as a bind-up. The coach started to move off. I felt frightened. All these weeks, looking forward to it, and now I didn't want to go. Please, Mum, let me go home. She was running alongside, waving her hanky and crying . . . He'd nagged his mother for weeks to let him go on the school exchange, swapping his home in the backstreets of a northern town for a posh house in London. With a proper family. With a dad. But now it was all going wrong . . .

Prequel to The Fib and other stories, this is a collection of nine funny and moving stories, featuring a boy growing up in a northern town in the 1950s and entering a grammar school. His problems, dilemmas, relationships and comic disasters are related.

The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

Presents an atmospheric view of growing up in the 1950s. The tales in this title deal with a young boy's small world, and its big implications.

George Layton’s stories evoke a nostalgic, atmospheric view of growing up in the 1950s. From the funny and faintly ridiculous to the terribly tragic, every tale brings a young boy’s small world, and its big implications, to life.