Fat

Rob Grant’s new novel is a revelation. After Incompetence, we would all have expected a killingly funny satire. And in its satire of our obsession with body image, of how the media makes us what we are, Fat is certainly that.

But in its depiction of Grenville, a fat man at his wits end with the need to be thin; of Hayleigh, a teenage girl obsessed with her terror of being fat, and of Jeremy, the self-absorbed, self-adoring ‘conceptualist’ employed to promote the gove…