Egg

‘Of all the suspicious looking houses in all the deserted woods in all the world…’, Egg rolls up at Foxy DuBois’s mansion. There he is royally entertained with a banquet, party games, a duet and a bed for the night, in the expectation that he will make a hearty breakfast for Foxy; an expectation that seems to have been fulfilled when Foxy finds him sitting up in bed in the morning, a hundred times larger than before. This slight tale, in which the main joke for the first part of the book is the necessary balanced inertia of the bow-tied but otherwise spherical Egg, is expertly orchestrated by Alex Smith, with attention to Foxy’s fashion and furnishing sense, a well-paced development of the story and the table-turning humour of the surprise ending. Nothing heavyweight here – not until the end anyway – but, like Egg himself, it’s perfectly formed.