A Spot of Bother (2006)

Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is back, turning his crisp, clear, nattily British prose to the Hall family, a group of fragile psyches teetering on a variety of brinks in the days before daughter Katie's wedding. As in Curious Incident, Haddon impressively describes what a mental disorder looks like from the inside: in this case, the breakdown of hypochondriac patriarch George. The bad news? In trying to follow four major emotional crises, Haddon sometimes makes clunky leaps in perspective. If Curious Incident was a laser beam trained on one fascinatingly flawed character, A Spot of Bother is a shotgun blast.