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Deep in the Bin of Bob
Amardeep Thinqir is a fourteen year old boy, and he’s keeping his thoughts to himself. He lives on a council estate in South London. He has no friends. Adults view him with mistrust. Children think he’s a weirdo. He reads books. He looks out of his bedroom window and imagines the life he wants to live that he isn’t.
We join Amardeep as he quietly stands at the foot of the tallest building he’s ever seen, with his hands over his eyes looking up with a mix of disbelief and wonderment. A rainbow coloured hot air balloon crashes into the building. The hot air balloon is something beautiful in Bermondsey: a flower growing through concrete. A girl screams from the rooftop and a big black dog falls from the sky and lands on the bonnet of an old two door car from the eighties. A little old lady needs help balancing three wheelbarrows, and something unusual is happening to the weather.
Deep decides to help the old woman, journey to the hot air balloon, save the girl, and stop off along the way to deliver some bad news to the owner of a black dog and a 1984 Ford Fiesta.
Deep in the Bin of Bob is dark, funny, philosophical and packed with original thought.
This is a story that holds a magnifying glass to the cruelty of man, and delights in pointing out the sublime in the hideous.
AWARDS
Craig Stone's second novel Life Knocks was shortlisted for the world respected Dundee International Book Prize.
INFORMATION ON AUTHOR CRAIG STONE
INTERVIEW WITH BBC
http://bit.ly/BBCComedyCafe
THE DUNDEE INTERNATIONAL BOOK PRIZE
http://www.dundeebookprize.com/
http://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/?p=51086
TWITTER
https://twitter.com/craigstone_
WEBSITE
www.thoughtscratchings.com
FACEBOOK
https://www.facebook.com/craig.stone....
A MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR...
The simple truth is, I will get nowhere without your help. I need readers to read #DeepInTheBinOfBob, so if you are looking for a book to read, or want to try a new author, please, try me. It would mean the world if you did.
Thank You.
We join Amardeep as he quietly stands at the foot of the tallest building he’s ever seen, with his hands over his eyes looking up with a mix of disbelief and wonderment. A rainbow coloured hot air balloon crashes into the building. The hot air balloon is something beautiful in Bermondsey: a flower growing through concrete. A girl screams from the rooftop and a big black dog falls from the sky and lands on the bonnet of an old two door car from the eighties. A little old lady needs help balancing three wheelbarrows, and something unusual is happening to the weather.
Deep decides to help the old woman, journey to the hot air balloon, save the girl, and stop off along the way to deliver some bad news to the owner of a black dog and a 1984 Ford Fiesta.
Deep in the Bin of Bob is dark, funny, philosophical and packed with original thought.
This is a story that holds a magnifying glass to the cruelty of man, and delights in pointing out the sublime in the hideous.
AWARDS
Craig Stone's second novel Life Knocks was shortlisted for the world respected Dundee International Book Prize.
INFORMATION ON AUTHOR CRAIG STONE
INTERVIEW WITH BBC
http://bit.ly/BBCComedyCafe
THE DUNDEE INTERNATIONAL BOOK PRIZE
http://www.dundeebookprize.com/
http://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/?p=51086
https://twitter.com/craigstone_
WEBSITE
www.thoughtscratchings.com
https://www.facebook.com/craig.stone....
A MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR...
The simple truth is, I will get nowhere without your help. I need readers to read #DeepInTheBinOfBob, so if you are looking for a book to read, or want to try a new author, please, try me. It would mean the world if you did.
Thank You.
202 pages, Paperback
First published February 20, 2014
47 people want to read
About the author
Craig Stone
5 books1,524 followersCraig Stone left school at sixteen with a head full of rocks, a general dislike towards anyone telling him what to do and a belief none of it mattered - because one day he would write the greatest book in the world. He is still trying to write the greatest book in the world.
Craig moved to Spain and worked for a man with a missing finger called Juan, a short gangster who owned the town. The morning after he was almost killed by a freight train trying to find Perpignan airport, he thought he should start writing some of his adventures down; but he was sixteen, so his writing only existed on the back of chewed beer mats.
A decade later, around the age of 26, Craig found his first literary agent Patrick Janson-Smith, from The Christopher Little Agency. Together, they found Craig his first book deal with Val Hudson at Headline UK for the novelty book How to Hide from Humans.
A few year later, Craig returned from living in Kauai, Hawaii, to find himself homeless. He lived in a garage, on a few sofa’s and eventually Gladstone Park in North London. While in Gladstone Park Craig wrote his first novel, The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness. He self-published this book from his sister’s spare bedroom, and received hundreds of five star reviews.
Patrick left Christopher Little and Craig needed to find a new agent. He soon found Sonia Land at Sheil Land Associates – the oldest Literary agency in London. Meanwhile, his future wife read The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness and slid into his DM’s on Twitter.
Armed with his new agent, Craig Stone’s second novel, Life Knocks, was shortlisted for the 2012 Dundee International Book Prize, judged by Stephen Fry and Philip Pullman.
Today, Craig is married with two children and lives in Kingston, West London. He is a mental health advocate and writes for the likes of The Guardian and Al Jazeera. His third novel was titled Deep in the Bin of Bob, and his fourth novel is due to be published in 2023, titled The Last March of the Pirate Snails.
The Last March of the Pirate Snails entirely rhymes, and is the first novel of its kind.
If every tale needs a meaning, then Craig’s life story has taught him this: don't sell your dreams for the illusion of safety. We’re all going to die, but before that, is opportunity – life, is not a queue to pointless oblivion. If you want to be a writer, write. If you want to be a doctor, get doctoring. Better to fail at something, than live for nothing.
Thank you for your interest in his writing.
Craig moved to Spain and worked for a man with a missing finger called Juan, a short gangster who owned the town. The morning after he was almost killed by a freight train trying to find Perpignan airport, he thought he should start writing some of his adventures down; but he was sixteen, so his writing only existed on the back of chewed beer mats.
A decade later, around the age of 26, Craig found his first literary agent Patrick Janson-Smith, from The Christopher Little Agency. Together, they found Craig his first book deal with Val Hudson at Headline UK for the novelty book How to Hide from Humans.
A few year later, Craig returned from living in Kauai, Hawaii, to find himself homeless. He lived in a garage, on a few sofa’s and eventually Gladstone Park in North London. While in Gladstone Park Craig wrote his first novel, The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness. He self-published this book from his sister’s spare bedroom, and received hundreds of five star reviews.
Patrick left Christopher Little and Craig needed to find a new agent. He soon found Sonia Land at Sheil Land Associates – the oldest Literary agency in London. Meanwhile, his future wife read The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness and slid into his DM’s on Twitter.
Armed with his new agent, Craig Stone’s second novel, Life Knocks, was shortlisted for the 2012 Dundee International Book Prize, judged by Stephen Fry and Philip Pullman.
Today, Craig is married with two children and lives in Kingston, West London. He is a mental health advocate and writes for the likes of The Guardian and Al Jazeera. His third novel was titled Deep in the Bin of Bob, and his fourth novel is due to be published in 2023, titled The Last March of the Pirate Snails.
The Last March of the Pirate Snails entirely rhymes, and is the first novel of its kind.
If every tale needs a meaning, then Craig’s life story has taught him this: don't sell your dreams for the illusion of safety. We’re all going to die, but before that, is opportunity – life, is not a queue to pointless oblivion. If you want to be a writer, write. If you want to be a doctor, get doctoring. Better to fail at something, than live for nothing.
Thank you for your interest in his writing.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 25, 2015
Amardeep Thinqir (Deep for his friends, but he doesn't have any) is 14 years old and lives in a poor family in South London. His Father is Muslim, so Deep has to be too, and his stepmum drinks. One day, on his way from school, Deep stops before the tallest building he has ever seen, because some outlandish things are happening there. As a wanna-be adventurer Deep decides to get to the bottom of it, or better to the top, because there's a girl screaming from the rooftop, and that is something Deep has to amend. So Deep enters the building.
What happens next is hard to say. In any case, the book can not easily be assigned to any specific genre. If I would say something like Alice-in-Wonderland meets The Three little Pigs meets Jaw I would not be right. What begins as an absurd funny story changes to one of the darkest matters conceivable, mixes with fairytale-ish horror only to break through the fourth wall to the reader (meta-fiction at its best). I won't reveal the end, but it moves me to read the book again. By knowing the end, the book reads certainly quite different.
I think Craig Stone manages to balance perfectly on the thin line between comedy, tragedy and nightmares and dreamscapes. This is probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I like to sip from this kind of story any day. Our hero Deep is not saying much (a cat got his tongue), but his deep thoughts, that is Deep's thoughts, off the mind of a fourteen-year-old, have moved this reader to think. I would imagine that the basic statements of the book, the thoughts of a deep thinker, can polarize the readership, and will lead to negative reviews. Be it as it may, I thank the author for his boldness - baldness? both!
Unconditional reading recommendation on my part!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
January 19, 2015
I read this book in two stages, with a break of about 3 month between. In the first stage I covered 90%. I found the book a bit too surrealistic for my taste with lots of surprising metaphors (or are they analogies?), maybe a little too many. When I took up the book again it was out of a sense of duty (anyway I'm German), but to my surprise and although I didn't remember the first part too well this last part went down real smooth and the surprising ending made me reconsider my judgment. I might even have a second go at the book.
March 10, 2014
I was drawn into buying this book because of a very entertaining blog post by Craig Stone. Then having bought it I was a little concerned how I was going to get on with it never having read this sort of book before. However I shouldn’t have been. I found it incredibly interesting and thought provoking. There are many things I shall never think about in the same way again, not least of which is Richard Dawkins! Or as I now prefer Richard Porkins! The writing and settings are strangely weird and beautifully brilliant and I feel that anything else I might now read could seem a little ordinary, a little bland in comparison. I would encourage anyone out there to give this book a go – you don’t know what you might be missing until you do!
February 28, 2015
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
(Spoilers within)
To say that "Deep In The Bin Of Bob" is a strange story would be an understatement. The story starts from one bizarre scenario and rapidly switches to new outlandish scenarios. In the beginning, "Deep", the main character, follows a woman into her home, which is completely dark and lit by glowworms. There's a bottomless pit in the middle of her kitchen, and she has things like a hippopotamus skin stuffed inside of a bear skin. It just gets stranger from there as Deep goes through the building working his way towards the roof, where a hot air balloon has crashed into it and he's convinced someone needs help.
If I were to describe what the story was like, I think I'd pick "Jacob's Ladder" as something similar. It's kind of like reading a fever dream.
Like the main character, this book tries very hard to be deep, and in a lot of spots it works. There's a lot of parts that will make you think. The writing is very stylistic, spending a lot of time describing scenes in detail and using a lot of metaphors. The author is good at painting strange, surreal scenes in a way that can be pictured. There's even the odd morbid but entertaining thought:
He would sit the owner down, and tell them how sorry he was, but their dog had been murdered by gravity.
Deep minded the sinkhole, he minded the sinkhole very much.
However, the book does get majorly bogged down by its own need to follow that style and be overly lengthy. One of the first issues I ran into was metaphors that make no sense.
His muscles felt heavy, like he was walking on toothpaste.
Walking on toothpaste could be a good description for the floor, but how does it relate to how heavy his muscles are?
His voice was thin and curly.
Thin I could maybe equate to weak, but curly? You can say that someone's hair feels like a poodle's fur - that brings up a very specific image and feel. You can say something smells like grass. People know what grass smells like. But if you say something was like flying the way poodles do or sounded like grass screaming it doesn't add anything because it's meaningless gibberish. Poodles don't fly, grass doesn't scream, putting those words into a sentence just pads it out with confusing chatter. It feels more like metaphors being shoved into a sentence because there's a metaphor quota rather than something that adds to the description, and they take away from the time of more meaningful things.
Read the rest here.
(Spoilers within)
To say that "Deep In The Bin Of Bob" is a strange story would be an understatement. The story starts from one bizarre scenario and rapidly switches to new outlandish scenarios. In the beginning, "Deep", the main character, follows a woman into her home, which is completely dark and lit by glowworms. There's a bottomless pit in the middle of her kitchen, and she has things like a hippopotamus skin stuffed inside of a bear skin. It just gets stranger from there as Deep goes through the building working his way towards the roof, where a hot air balloon has crashed into it and he's convinced someone needs help.
If I were to describe what the story was like, I think I'd pick "Jacob's Ladder" as something similar. It's kind of like reading a fever dream.
Like the main character, this book tries very hard to be deep, and in a lot of spots it works. There's a lot of parts that will make you think. The writing is very stylistic, spending a lot of time describing scenes in detail and using a lot of metaphors. The author is good at painting strange, surreal scenes in a way that can be pictured. There's even the odd morbid but entertaining thought:
He would sit the owner down, and tell them how sorry he was, but their dog had been murdered by gravity.
Deep minded the sinkhole, he minded the sinkhole very much.
However, the book does get majorly bogged down by its own need to follow that style and be overly lengthy. One of the first issues I ran into was metaphors that make no sense.
His muscles felt heavy, like he was walking on toothpaste.
Walking on toothpaste could be a good description for the floor, but how does it relate to how heavy his muscles are?
His voice was thin and curly.
Thin I could maybe equate to weak, but curly? You can say that someone's hair feels like a poodle's fur - that brings up a very specific image and feel. You can say something smells like grass. People know what grass smells like. But if you say something was like flying the way poodles do or sounded like grass screaming it doesn't add anything because it's meaningless gibberish. Poodles don't fly, grass doesn't scream, putting those words into a sentence just pads it out with confusing chatter. It feels more like metaphors being shoved into a sentence because there's a metaphor quota rather than something that adds to the description, and they take away from the time of more meaningful things.
Read the rest here.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 12, 2014
Craig Stone changed the way I wrote, for many years I tried to be like everyone else. I tried to appeal to the masses and the agents and the publishers, but then I read "Life Knocks" and realised that I was wasting my time. Mr Stone has a unique style and attitude and whilst I wouldn't dream of trying to emulate his style I have followed his lead and thought f*ck it I'll do it my own way. I self-published at first and then thought f*ck that I'll start my own publishing company.
But this isn't about me, this is about Mr Stone.
As I said earlier he has his own style, he describes things in a way that no one else does. He dabbles in the surreal but is firmly rooted in reality. Deep In The Bin Of Bob follows an improbably named young Muslim on a journey, the journey takes place on a London council estate but that doesn't matter.
You should buy this book and then everything else he has written, get in (fairly) early while you still can.
But this isn't about me, this is about Mr Stone.
As I said earlier he has his own style, he describes things in a way that no one else does. He dabbles in the surreal but is firmly rooted in reality. Deep In The Bin Of Bob follows an improbably named young Muslim on a journey, the journey takes place on a London council estate but that doesn't matter.
You should buy this book and then everything else he has written, get in (fairly) early while you still can.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews