Amazing Disgrace brings back Gerald Samper (first introduced in Cooking with Fernet Branca), a socially inept gay man who is a ghost-writer of bad autobiographies and has strange culinary tastes and a horrific singing voice. He's writing the autobiography of a woman he's coming to despise, Millie Cleat, but he'd rather be writing the biography of a famous conductor. Millie is a grandmother sailor with just one arm, having lost the other to a shark, who recently set a record for a solo circumnavigation of the globe. She's gone a bit off the deep end, thinking she's the human manifestation of the sea and wearing a transparent prosthetic arm with a fish inside, and she wants some changes to Gerald's book to reflect her new spirituality. Gerald's boyfriend, though, wants to expose her for destroying oceanographic research projects. Other parts of Gerald's life descend into a series of pratfalls and unintended consequences, including the pills he bought to increase his penis size. James Hamilton-Paterson's novel has received mostly positive reviews with the Washington Post saying, "If you're filled with lofty ideals and ambition and a strong sense of right and wrong,
Amazing Disgrace will probably offend you. If you're far enough along in life (and I don't mean old!) that 99 percent of the human condition seems like God's Own Little Joke, pick this up for some well-earned consolation."
