Filed: August 10, 2025
Oscar Slamp: The UK Gets It
Seems word’s out across the pond — and it didn’t come from a press release, a polite email blast, or some PR intern who calls me “Oskar” in subject lines.
It came the old way: somebody read the thing, loved it, and couldn’t shut up about it.
Now The Mostly True Tale of Getting Roofied in Tokyo and Waking Up Married in Rural Thailand has been turning up in places I’ve never been invited but would drink at anyway — from the upstairs rooms of Camden pubs to the rain-shined back streets of Edinburgh after the book festival’s last call.
Readers in Manchester are talking about Willie like he’s one of their own — a bloke they met once in a Northern Quarter bar, disappeared for years, then resurfaced in some Thai rice paddy with a water buffalo and a story no one believed.
Bristol book clubs have been passing it around like contraband.
In Liverpool, somebody slipped a copy onto the “Staff Picks” shelf without permission. Whoever you are — cheers.
Maybe it’s no surprise. The UK has always had a taste for the messy, the unvarnished, the gallows-humour sort of redemption. From Orwell’s tea-soaked cynicism to Irvine Welsh’s speed-fueled grit, there’s a shared language here, the one you speak when you’ve seen the best and worst of yourself in the same night.
And it’s not just the readers. I’m hearing whispers from Soho film circles, a pint-glass rumour from Sheffield that Warp Films got handed a copy, and someone in London’s West End apparently read it between theatre matinees. If the right set of eyes lands on these pages, Willie might just stumble his way onto a screen near you.
So yes — call it a smash hit in the UK. Proudly.
To everyone in Britain who’s found me, found Willie, and let the story under their skin — thank you. You’ve made an old cynic believe in word-of-mouth again.
Until we meet in some dim corner of Hackney, Cardiff, or maybe just at a Glasgow train station bar —
Keep passing it on.
From the margins,
— Oscar