Stand Up, Barry Goldman

All I'd wanted for as long as I could remember was a woman to love, a soulmate to live with in contentment for the rest of my days: friend, lover, companion, mother to our children.

Time was running out: I was getting old. Next year I would be eighteen.

Barry Goldman is a sensitive boy. He's being primed to run the family business but has discovered a talent for making audiences laugh at his silly poems.

At last, he has found something that might make him attractive to girls - in particular, Harriet Fink - but there's not much call for delicate, earnest poets in the 1970s comedy world of hot-panted dolly birds and battle-axe mothers-in-law.

Then one night he sees Kris Dean on a stage in Edinburgh and understands that the world of comedy is about to change forever.

Stand Up, Barry Goldman - like Elena Ferrante, but with jokes - is the debut novel of David J. Cohen, stand-up comedian and writer best known as the creator of dozens of songs for multi-BAFTA winning hit TV show Horrible Histories, and less well known as lead singer in the world's first Jewish heavy metal band, Guns'n'Moses.

"Funny and fascinating, a lovely tale" Jo Brand

"Powerfully funny, often moving... Dave has created the Jewish Adrian Mole of alternative comedy." David Quantick

"In the last anxiety-making days of lockdown Dave made me laugh out loud from the first few pages. This novel about the world of stand-up comedy is funnier than the real thing." Linda Grant

"Evokes all the tension of doing your first Edinburgh Fringe but without incurring the life-changing overdraft" Jack Dee