Jerome K Jerome

Three Men in a Boat Jerome K Jerome

Proper version, unabridged, readable text sizeThree Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel.
One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers - the jokes have been praised as fresh and witty. The three men are based on Jerome himself (the narrator Jerome K. Jerome) and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom Jerome often took boating trips.
Three Men in a Boat was recently ranked by the Guardian as one of the twenty-five best novels of all time and by Esquire UK as one of the top twenty funniest books ever written.