Me Cheeta
Written by James Lever
- Longlisted
- The Man Booker Prize 2009
- Published by 4th Estate
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James Lever’s incredible, moving and hilarious story of Cheeta the Chimp, simian star of the silver screen in the golden years of Hollywood
The truth behind the tale of a monkey stolen from deepest Africa and forced to make a living among the fake jungles and faker stars of Tinseltown. Me Cheeta covers his struggle with drink and addiction to cigars, his breakthrough with a radical new form of abstract painting, his fondness for hamburgers and his battle in later life with diabetes. Funny, moving - and so searingly honest you know it has to be fiction - this is the greatest celebrity non-memoir of recent times.
James Lever
When Me Cheeta was longlisted for the prize, James Lever was assumed in some quarters to be a pseudonym; two of the names most frequently bandied about were Martin Amis and Wilf Self
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