There’s a kind of book you shouldn’t take into a doctor’s waiting room. You sit there in the medicated hush, minding your blood pressure, and then a line ambushes you. Out comes a noise no grown adult should make in a room full of strangers. To be clear, that noise is a snort of laughter, not sudden flatulence, and Nick Spalding writes that kind of book.
Spalding was born on the Isle of Wight in 1974 and spent most of his working life in media and marketing before he sat down and wrote a comedy about two hopeless singletons. Love From Both Sides tells the whole miserable, funny business of modern dating from his side and her side in turn: Jamie and Laura, two thirty-somethings blundering towards each other through every awkwardness the process can throw up. He put it out himself in 2012. It sold a quarter of a million copies inside the year, Hodder and Stoughton came knocking on the strength of it, and he’s since shifted into the millions. Bricking It, a later one, hands a brother and sister a derelict farmhouse and lets the archaic plumbing do the rest.
I mention the marketing background and the do-it-yourself start because they’re mine too. I sold a marketing business, wrote a novel on the back of a daft New Year’s bet, and put it out myself in 2016 after the literary agents of Britain declined to reply to a single one of my emails. My books lean on time travel where Spalding leans on dating disasters, but the engine underneath is the same: an ordinary person, a life gone sideways, and a laugh on nearly every page with something tender waiting at the end. If you’d like a shove towards the right one to begin with, the Start Here page does exactly that. Spalding has a big following in the States, and if you’ve come from there, the good news is my lot are all on Amazon US, free in Kindle Unlimited, and available in audiobook format.
Right. Three British comic novelists to keep the laughing-in-quiet-places habit going, and what each one shares with Spalding.
Mike Gayle has been quietly devastating readers since 1998
Mike Gayle grew up in Birmingham, read Sociology at Salford, and drifted into journalism, where he spent a stretch as a magazine agony uncle dispensing advice to the lovelorn. Useful training, as it turned out. His first novel, My Legendary Girlfriend, landed in the Sunday Times top ten in 1998 and follows Will Kelly, a young teacher who cannot for the life of him stop pining over the girlfriend he lost years ago. It is very funny and faintly heartbreaking, often in the same paragraph.
Then came Turning Thirty, and later Turning Forty, in which poor Matt Beckford has his wife call time on the marriage and finds himself staring down a landmark birthday broke, homeless, and entirely alone. Gayle has spent a career writing blokes at the precise moment their lives stop cooperating, and he never once lets the jokes talk him out of the feeling. That’s the Spalding overlap in a sentence. Both men understand that the laugh lands harder when there’s a real ache holding it up, and both write male characters honest enough to admit they’ve made a hash of things.
Matt Dunn writes men who mean well and manage almost nothing
Before Matt Dunn wrote a word of fiction, he did a genuinely peculiar run of jobs. IT headhunter. Fitness equipment salesman. Professional lifeguard, and not a hobbyist one either; he was part of the team that won the British and Commonwealth Lifesaving Championship in 1984. I find the lifeguarding stays with me longer than it ought to. You picture him hauling a mannequin out of a pool with the same calm he’d later bring to a wrecked relationship.
His breakout, The Ex-Boyfriend’s Handbook, follows Ed, a man dumped and then gently reassembled by his best mate Dan, and it earned shortlist nods for both the Romantic Novel of the Year Award and the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance. A Day at the Office and 13 Dates followed in the same register. Dunn works the same corner as Spalding: romantic comedy told largely from the fella’s point of view, full of men who are decent underneath and hopeless on the surface. If Love From Both Sides made you fond of Jamie despite his best efforts, Dunn has a shelf of Jamies waiting for you.
Danny Wallace arrived at fiction the long way round
Danny Wallace made his name doing ridiculous things on purpose and reporting back. He put a small ad in a paper reading “Join Me” without explaining what he was joining, accidentally founded a movement, and wrote it up as a book. He spent a year saying yes to absolutely everything, which became Yes Man and, eventually, a film with Jim Carrey wearing the year rather more loosely than Danny did. His collection Awkward Situations for Men is exactly what the title promises.
So his novels come with an intimacy the stunt books trained into him. Charlotte Street gives a drifting, decent bloke a disposable camera left behind by a woman he spoke to for thirty seconds, and follows him developing the photos and, foolishly, his hopes. Who Is Tom Ditto? takes an ordinary man whose partner vanishes with a baffling note. The Spalding kinship is the whimsy kept honest by feeling: one small, silly impulse tips an unremarkable life into something that matters, and you’re laughing right up until the point you unexpectedly aren’t.
What the four of them are really up to
Line these writers up and the family resemblance is obvious. British, funny, self-deprecating, and completely uninterested in pretending life is tidier than it is. Their heroes are ordinary people in the wreckage of a relationship or a job or a plan, narrating their own downfall with a running commentary you’d happily buy a coffee to hear more of. Nobody here is above making a fool of themselves for your entertainment. Crucially, none of them will let you off with pure farce either; sooner or later a plain, true sentence about love or loneliness slips in under the radar, and that’s the moment the book stops being a diversion and starts being one you press on other people.
Which is roughly what I’m doing to you now. If that mix of daft and heartfelt is your thing, try Meeting Mungo Thunk. Adam Maxwell has been short of common sense since a formative incident involving a gherkin and a maths lesson, and one spectacularly ill-judged decision finally tips his life over the edge. Enter Mungo Thunk: a strange, bald little man who turns up offering therapy no qualified professional would recognise, and somehow talks Adam into becoming a person worth the trouble. It’s the funniest thing I’ve written and the one that most reliably makes readers laugh out loud before quietly rethinking their own behaviour. Just don’t start it in the doctor’s waiting room. You can meet Mungo here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of books does Nick Spalding write?
Nick Spalding writes broad, laugh-out-loud British comedy fiction, usually about relationships, dating, and ordinary domestic chaos. His breakout, Love From Both Sides, began as a 2012 self-published e-book that sold a quarter of a million copies in its first year and led to deals with Hodder and Stoughton and, later, Amazon Publishing’s Lake Union imprint. He is the bestselling author of eighteen novels along with novellas and memoirs, and has sold into the millions.
Which authors are most like Nick Spalding?
For the same mix of big laughs and genuine warmth, try Mike Gayle (start with My Legendary Girlfriend), Matt Dunn (start with The Ex-Boyfriend’s Handbook), and Danny Wallace (start with Charlotte Street). Keith A Pearson writes in the same tradition of funny, heartfelt British fiction about ordinary people whose lives go sideways, with Meeting Mungo Thunk a good first stop.
Where should I start with Keith A Pearson’s books?
If you enjoy Nick Spalding, Meeting Mungo Thunk is a natural first read: a laugh-out-loud comedy with a real emotional undertow, built around an ordinary man and the peculiar stranger who upends his life. For a suggestion matched to your taste, the Start Here page on keithapearson.co.uk will point you to the right book.
Do these authors write comedy with emotional depth, like Nick Spalding?
Yes, and that’s the whole point of the comparison. Mike Gayle, Matt Dunn, Danny Wallace, and Keith A Pearson all lead with humour but refuse to let the jokes crowd out real feeling. Each writes ordinary British characters through relationship trouble, midlife wobbles, and self-inflicted disasters, so the laughs sit on top of something that genuinely lands.
Are Keith A Pearson’s books available in the US and on Kindle Unlimited?
Yes. Keith’s novels are available on Amazon US as well as in the UK, free to read in Kindle Unlimited, and available as audiobooks. Nick Spalding, Mike Gayle, Matt Dunn, and Danny Wallace are all widely available on both sides of the Atlantic too.