2017/26 Paul Beatty: The Sellout (2015) ***

This won the Man Booker Prize in 2016 and it is a novel of great wit, which riffs on being black, indeed being a nigger, raised by a social scientist father on an urban farm in Dickens, a ghetto community in southern Los Angeles. His father's harsh regime carrying out social experiments on his son provided some laugh-out-loud moments but overall it was mostly occasional wry smiles, rather a lacklustre response compared with those of the many well known fans cited over several pages. A clever writer but for me the book was oversold.