'Woody Allen and William Boyd have had a bastard love-child and his name is Mark Watson'

Watson's command of the warped modern jargons of both celebrity and therapy give his book a rancidly comic flavour...

A middle-aged, successful psychiatrist to America's celebrities reflects back over the high-profile patients he has cured - a female folk singer with a stalker who claims to be the object of her love songs, a celebrated leading actress in Macbeth suffering from chronic stage-fright and visions of her own death, and over-driven but remarkable young tennis star. As he delves back into past cases, he reveals his own troubled childhood, and his career and his rivalry with his best friend and fellow star psychiatrist Richard Aloisi.

'Bullet Points' is the titles of the psychiatric thesis that catapulted our narrator to fame, his discovery that one can get a lot of bizarre insight into people's lives if one lays out the defining facts like the index to a book. But as the story unfurls over the course of these reflections, we come to see our narrator is not the reliable witness to events that we at first assumed he was - and that he might in fact be the one in need of a cure. When finally the bullet points of the narrators life are laid out, the facts he has hidden from the reader are shockingly revealed ?

A fast, slick, and at times brilliantly funny debut novel from one of British literature's most promising young stars.

Psychologist Peter Kristal has a method for sorting out people's lives. By arranging their histories like the index entries in a biography - born, 1-achieves various things, 2-x - dies, x+1 - the sequences of cause and effect that have led to their particular neuroses is cunningly revealed. His technique gains him a modicum of success: a thriving practise in Chicago (a far cry from his native East Anglia), with a client list comprised of rising stars. But, Pete is constantly aware that his childhood friend, Richard Aloisi, is always one lap ahead of him. Based in New York, Richard is treating A-list celebrities and advising the NYPD on high-profile court cases. Pete would be the first to admit that his inferiority complex is the key bullet point in his life. But by concentrating on Richard as the source of his problems, he is blind to other factors which put both his life and the lives of others at risk-Never as obvious as it purports to be, "Bullet Points" is a wonderfully witty, pacey, clever novel that keeps you guessing to the very end.

Twenty-three-year-old Mark Watson has imagined himself into the head of a middle-aged man with remarkable skill, creating a character whose destructive sense of inadequacy will touch a nerve in anyone who has wanted to be someone else.

Take Dave Eggers, Ben Elton and John Lanchester (in Debt to Pleasure mode) and you might get a sense of this brilliant first novel from a prodigiously talented 23-year-old stand-up comedian.

Mark Watson:
Mark Watson was born in Bristol in 1980. A stand-up comedian, he recently gained international attention with the world's first solo 24-hour show, which won three Edinburgh Festival awards and was described by the Scotsman as 'one of the defining moments of fringe comedy, sure to become a cultural legend'. He had previously won the 2002 Daily Telegraph Open Mic Award, and been nominated for the Perrier Best Newcomer Award in 2001 with the show 'Far Too Happy'. He lives in London with his fianc-e, who accepted his proposal on stage.

Before They Were Famous

I first became interested in psychology in 1964, when I was fourteen and my English teacher stood accused of being insane. A tall, willowy man in a grey suit visited our school to investigate the accusation. He knew my father slightly, as Dad was the local police constable and they had worked together on a case once before. The man stayed at our house for a few nights and was soon introduced to me as a psychologist. Although I tried to remain impassive when passing him on the stairs, I naturally assumed that he could look into my soul.

If he had chosen to do this, he would have seen that my only major personality quirk was a blossoming inferiority complex. My best friend, Richard Aloisi, was the school's outstanding student and our interests collided with what sometimes seemed malicious frequency. The pattern for our friendship was set by our first meeting, at the eleventh birthday party of someone I no longer remember. I had just impressed a crowd of potential new friends by fitting three ping-pong balls into my mouth, a difficult trick taught to me by my uncle Tom on the otherwise uneventful Christmas Day 1961. Widely admired for my achievement, I was offering tuition to a narrow-mouthed acquaintance in exchange for part of his cake when in walked Richard, jaw impossibly stretched to accommodate four balls. My uncle had told me that the 'four-ball fit' was achieved only by a tiny 1.elite; my heart sank at my first encounter in life with an obviously superior rival. 'Don't try four, Pete,' Tom had warned me gravely, removing the saliva-coated balls from my mouth like coins from a fruit machine as my mother watched unimpressed, 'and if you meet a fellow who can do it, stay out of his way.' That night, six girls collected Richard's phone number. Just two took mine, one of them (Jennifer O'Hara) later trading it for a can of Coke.

Richard and I would review this party with appropriate sentimentality years later, at another celebration: this time, the valedictory beerfest which marked our school leaving day. The guest list was almost the same, the same mannerisms and gestures now manifest in the bodies and faces of older, drunker people, as if all our school days had been a film in which the first occasion soft-faded into this one, only a montage of falling leaves and tumbling calendar pages marking the time. On this occasion, Richard - now, like me, America-bound - was asked what he would like on his grave-stone. After a second's pause, he said: 'I'd like to have no inscription at all, just my name. If you've really made it, they don't need to write who you were.'

This brought a chorus of appreciative murmurs. Even accounting for the hyperbolic emotions running wild through leaving night, it was the kind of comment that everyone could easily imagine repeating to awed children as Richard landed on the moon. When it was my turn to answer the gravestone question, I predicted: 'Mine will probably say, RICHARD ALOISI'S GRAVE THIS WAY.' The laugh that rewarded this comment was one of my proudest moments in secondary education.

The minor scandal over the controversial English teacher, Mr Paulson, was a rare taste of sensation in our home town, the last place in England untouched by the spirit of rebellion which would define the decade in the eyes of posterity. Witching was such an undistinguished place that an adequate summary of its history was printed on the book-marks sold in its ailing, often closed library, where my mother had worked part-time for years. In 1682, the bookmarks revealed, the town earned its name with an act of superstitious brutality: three women accused of summoning the Devil were stripped naked and burned to death on the Green opposite the church, before an enormous crowd 'who in their excitement almost trampled each other to death'. The women protested their innocence, insisting that Satan had never visited them - he took one look at the place and walked twenty miles to Cambridge instead, according to a local joke - and it was said that they took revenge for their mistreatment by placing a terrible curse upon the town with their final breaths. If this curse existed, though, there was disappointingly little evidence of its working as I grew up.

No dreadful cries could be heard in the dead of night; no mysterious plague struck at the heart of the community; a documentary crew who arrived to capture a ghost on film were forced to make do with a sound engineer wrapped in a sheet. Richard and I once sneaked out at midnight on the anniversary of the witches' execution, undetected by both sets of parents - my young heart froze as I crept over the third stair from the top, which at the gentlest touch gave a creak as loud as a door in a horror movie - and headed for their death-spot on the Green, the meeting-place of all the town's disturbed spirits. Scorched into the grass was a large, ineradicable red-brown stain said by local legend to have been made by the witches' animal sacrifices, which mothers wheeling pushchairs and old couples on the way to bingo still studiously sidestepped. All we saw in exchange for our boldly executed plan, however, was a drunkard slumped against the low perimeter fence and a couple of shadowy figures groping each other in the half darkness. A year later, when I proposed repeating our investigations, Richard told me loftily that evil spirits were a product of the imagination, pointing to evidence in the Children's First Book of Scepticism which his parents had bought him for Christmas.

2007-08-26 i laughed, i cried, i recommended it to you...

because i enjoyed it so much. also, if you missed the
meaning of life and hate everything in the world then go see on of his new stand up gigs!i have to admit i only saw the two so far ad i shall be buying the new book so, what have you go to loose?