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Anansi Boys
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Anansi Boys (2005) (edit title/settings)

by Neil Gaiman (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Fat Charlie Nancy's normal life ended the moment his father dropped dead on a Florida karaoke stage. Charlie didn't know his dad was a god. And he never knew he had a brother. Now brother Spider's on his doorstep—about to make Fat Charlie's life more interesting . . . and a lot more... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “'It's your first time', said the policeman.'Sorry.''Drugs?' said the policeman.'No, thank you,' said Fat Charlie”
  • “'If you abandon me down here I don't know how I'd get out.''Don't tempt me.'”
    Charlie and Spider
  • “I don't think I could have written Fat Charlie without having had both an excellent but embarrassing father and wonderful but embarrassed children. Hurrah for families.”
    Neil Gaiman (Acknowledgements)
  • “Mrs. Dunwiddy was old, and she looked it. There were geological ages that were probably younger than Mrs. Dunwiddy. As a boy, he had imagined Mrs. Dunwiddy in Equatorial Africa, peering disapprovingly through her thick spectacles at the newly erect hominids. "Keep out of my front yard," she would tell a recently evolved and rather nervous speciman of Homo habilis, "or I'm going to belt you." She was a tiny old lady who could outglare a thunderstorm.”
  • “The meaning of life is the hot blood of your prey on your tongue, the meat that rends beneath your teeth, the corpse of your enemy left in the sun for the carrion eaters to finish.”
    Tiger
  • “Birds, are the last of the dinosaurs. Tiny velociraptors with wings. Devouring defenseless wiggly things and,and nuts, and fish, and, and other birds. They get the early worms. And have you ever watched a chicken eat? They may look innocent, but birds are, well, they're vicious.”
    Spider
  • “It's MY bloody house. And I'M going to bloody answer my OWN front door, thank you very much.”
    Fat Charlie
  • “"The important thing about songs is that they're just like stories. They don't mean a damn unless there's people listenin' to them."”
    Anansi
  • “It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other.”
  • “EACH PERSON WHO EVER WAS OR IS OR WILL BE HAS A SONG. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.”
  • “Charlie has a son. His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and posesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.”
  • “It's a good thing to have friends with more houses than they have bodies, especially if they're happy to share. Most of the rest of the time I wrote in the local coffee house, and drank cup after cup of terrible tea in a rather pathetic demonstration of hope over experience.”
    Neil Gaiman
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other.
    Highlighted by 27 Kindle customers
  • EACH PERSON WHO EVER WAS OR IS OR WILL BE HAS A SONG. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.
    Highlighted by 25 Kindle customers
  • Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad: there was pity in that expression, along with almost infinite compassion.
    Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers
  • “There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life,” said Spider. “These things are wine, women and song.”
    Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers
  • Songs remain. They last. The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties. A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That’s the power of songs.
    Highlighted by 19 Kindle customers
  • STORIES ARE WEBS, INTERCONNECTED STRAND TO STRAND, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of story.
    Highlighted by 18 Kindle customers
  • In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It’s not even coincidence. It’s just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.
    Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
  • Spider venom comes in many forms. It can often take a long while to discover the full effects of the bite. Naturalists have pondered this for years: there are spiders whose bite can cause the place bitten to rot and to die, sometimes more than a year after it was bitten. As to why spiders do this, the answer is simple. It’s because spiders think this is funny, and they don’t want you ever to forget them.
    Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
  • People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don’t have their own song.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew, and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each. What’s that? You want to know if Anansi looked like a spider? Sure he did, except when he looked like a man. No, he never changed his shape. It’s just a matter of how you tell the story. That’s all.
    Highlighted by 3 Kindle customers
Show all 22 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

London

Organizations edit see section history

First Sentence edit see section history

It begins, as most things begin, with a song.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Chapter One - Which Is Mostly About Names and Family Relationships
Chapter Two - Which Is Mostly About the Things That Happen After Funerals
Chapter Three - In Which There Is a Family Reunion
Chapter Four - Which Concludes with an Evening of Wine, Women and Song
Chapter Five - In Which We Examine the Many Consequences of the Morning After
Chapter Six - In Which Fat Charlie Fails to Get Home, Even by Taxi
Chapter Seven - In Which Fat Charlie Goes a Long Way
Chapter Eight - In Which a Pot of Coffee Comes in Particularly Useful
Chapter Nine - In Which Fat Charlie Answers the Door and Spider Encounters Flamingos
Chapter Ten - In Which Fat Charlie Sees the World and Maeve Livingstone Is Dissatisfied
Chapter Eleven - In Which Rosie Learns to Say No to Strangers and Fat Charlie Acquires a Lime
Chapter Twelve - In Which Fat Charlie Does Several Things for the First Time
Chapter Thirteen - Which Proves to Be Unlucky for Some
Chapter Fourteen - Which Comes to Several Conclusions
Acknowledgments

Glossary edit see section history

  • Absatively: A combination of the words 'absolutely' and 'positively', frequently used by Grahame Coats

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Neil Gaiman (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: William Morrow
Country: United States
Publication Date: 2005, September
ISBN: 006051518X
Page Count: 336

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PR6057.A319A85 2005
  • Dewey: 813.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Adults

This novel contains mature content.

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • American Gods
  • Bloodsucking Fiends
  • Glass Soup
  • Marvels
  • Salvation
  • The Wolves in the Walls
  • The Sandman
  • Legends in Exile
  • Year One
  • Death: The High Cost of Living
  • Bedlam's Bard

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

   
  • American Gods
  • Neverwhere

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