We Are Pirates: A Novel

A boat has gone missing. Goods have been stolen. There is blood in the water. It is the twenty-first century and a crew of pirates is terrorizing the San Francisco Bay.

Phil is a husband, a father, a struggling radio producer, and the owner of a large condo with a view of the water. But he'd like to be a rebel and a fortune hunter.

Gwen is his daughter. She's fourteen. She's a student, a swimmer, and a best friend. But she'd like to be an adventurer and an outlaw.

Phil teams up with his young, attractive assistant. They head for the open road, attending a conference to seal a deal.

Gwen teams up with a new, fierce friend and some restless souls. They head for the open sea, stealing a boat to hunt for treasure.

We Are Pirates is a novel about our desperate searches for happiness and freedom, about our wild journeys beyond the boundaries of our ordinary lives.

Also, it's about a teenage girl who pulls together a ragtag crew to commit mayhem in the San Francisco Bay, while her hapless father tries to get her home.

Honest and funny, dark and painful, We Are Pirates reads like the result of a nightmarish mating experiment between Joseph Heller and Captain Jack Sparrow.? It’s the strangest, most brilliant offering yet from the mind behind Lemony Snicket (Neil Gaiman)

Daniel Handler turns whimsy into wisdom and the fantastic into the great. He is, of course, a genius (Lorrie Moore)

We Are Pirates will dazzle, disturb and delight you. It might even do things to you that don’t start with the letter D, like remind you what it's like to be young, or convince you that Daniel Handler can do anything (Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins)

There is no writer quite like Daniel Handler. Somehow he manages to work at the intersection of irony and wonderment, whimsy and menace – a space I’m not sure I knew existed until I read his work (Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad)

It’s been a long time since I read a book quite as crazy as We Are Pirates. It manages to be funny, weird, dark and moving all at once. It’s a wild and anarchic ride, as gleefully out-of-step with much literary fiction as a pirate galleon amid a fleet of sailing dinghies, and all the better for it. I loved it (Matt Haig, author of The Humans)

I finished it. I devoured it. I loved it! We Are Pirates is extraordinary. I sat there wondering how something could be so dispassionate, and yet so heartfelt at the same time. And then, the next second, it made me laugh out loud. Remarkable story, remarkable characters, remarkable prose. I’ll carry it in my head for ever (Russell T Davies)

A macabre, darkly human portrayal of family dynamics and growing up in a world running low on adventure ... Handler, as Lemony Snicket, has always been popular with adult readers as well as YAs, and that situation should prove true of this new novel (Booklist)

A “pirate story for grownups”, about a teenage girl causing mayhem in San Francisco bay, from the author more commonly known as Lemony Snicket (Guardian Ones to Watch 2015)

Beneath all the trappings of make-believe and fancy dress, there is a poignant, serious story about a girl’s need to find her true self, shackled to her desire to escape from the world – and the irreconcilable, sometimes bloody conflict between those two yearnings ... Although We Are Pirates is as ragged and slapdash as its crew, its voyage is no less joyful or defiant (Daily Telegraph)

This, his fifth novel for adults, retains the whimsy, intrigue and high camp of his children’s fiction ... Silly but poignant **** (Sunday Telegraph)

A weird mish-mash of the realistic and the fantastical, the comic and the tragic – but it’s by no means a casual one. After you finish the book, you realise how carefully it’s been put together, and how successfully it achieves its aim of remind us of the sheer (and inescapable) oddness of modern life (Reader’s Digest)

Shaped by a wild imagination ... It’s funny and outrageous – a plea for the possibility of adventure, superbly imagined (The Times)

A touching and often dark tale of a father and daughter striving for something more from life. Their quests for happiness and freedom smack of rebellion and are written with brutal honesty and the piercing wit of an author on top of his game (Shortlist)

A madcap, disturbingly funny novel that teeters on the edge of the surreal, even as it asks us to examine who and what we value (Observer)

This is grown-up Snicket – its darkness darker, its sadness sadder, its faith in the ordered moral universe wrung out and left to drip despondently, like a fed-up faulty tap ... Be prepared when entering his world. He’ll stay with you (Big Issue Cymru)

A tale that hovers somewhere between realism and fantasy. Full of sharp (and angry) observations about modern life, We Are Pirates is strange, dark and subversive (Financial Times)

Gloriously cut loose from much in the current book market, We Are Pirates is a pirate adventure for grown-ups set in modern-day San Francisco ... A swashbuckling, wonderfully eccentric message in a bottle for those seeking a social order beyond the realm of traditional authority ... Hilarious and haunting (Independent on Sunday)

Displaying typically impudent imagination, Handler choreographs this quixotic whimsy with a dexterous touch and flashes of wit ... While the novel builds to a thrillingly mounted and surprisingly emotive climax, the absence of sympathetic characters to root for also holes it below the waterline and leaves it and its cargo of rich prose stranded some way from port (Sunday Times)

Handler has conjured a set of haphazard juxtapositions, featuring the funny and the creepy, the frantic and the elegiac, the sparkling and the rotten (Liz Jensen, Guardian)