The Daily Mail hated it, which made me oddly happy, particularly because the reviewer made a big point of it being a Waste of Lottery Money. That MirrorMask wasn't made with Lottery Money, of course, would never bother the Daily Mail, who were, the last time I looked at a copy, very concerned with people wasting lottery money and asylum seekers. I'm sure that it was only due to shortage of space that they didn't accuse MirrorMask of harbouring dodgy foreign asylum seekers.
(I can't see the review on line, I'm afraid. But looking for it, I idly googled Flook, the "Trog" cartoon strip that was, when I was growing up, the only thing worth reading in the Daily Mail, and found myself reading the obituary of Sandy Fawkes, married for a while to Wally Fawkes, who was Trog, and shaking my head in wonder. When I die I want someone to write that sort of obituary about me. She wore clothes that had been in the height of fashion in the 1970s, for, since she ate little, she had kept her figure. She habitually wore a fur hat that made it look as if a cat was curled up on her head...)
The UK cover of ANANSI BOYS in paperback just arrived in my email, and I discovered:
a) that it will come in two versions, the white and the blue, each with a silver spider's web on it.
b) despite the cover having the same content and typeface as the UK hardback -- showing my name, the book's name and a spider's web -- this version is somehow really cheerful and upbeat, while the hardback, with a different web, was sort of sinister...
c) it will have a quote from Ian Hislop on the cover, which probably won't mean very much to non-Brits, but will mean a lot to readers of Private Eye or watchers of Have I Got New For You?
It will look like this:
and it won't be out from Headline for a few months.