Evan Gottlieb

This piece of speculative fiction seems to me to belong to a relatively new subgenre: eco-comedy, or more specifically, eco-satire. It is a remarkable piece of near-future fiction, simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, intricately plotted but almost never plodding, filled with characters who perfectly straddle the line between quirky originals and recognizable types. And then of course there are the elusive fish of the novel's title! To say more would be to rob Beauman's novel of its full power to surprise, delight, and challenge -- and that would be a crime against both the flawed humans and the tenacious non-human animals that this book chuckles at and sighs for, respectively.