Steve Martin has spent decades reducing us to tears of laughter with such movies as Planes, Trains And Automobiles and Dead Men Dont Wear Plaid, yet on the quiet hes also established himself as a writer of some repute. As well as penning several collections of essays (one entitled Pure Drivel), he's also knocked out The Pleasure Of My Own Company, a novel about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and The Object Of Beauty, the story of an aspiring young artist plunged into New Yorks dark side during the hedonistic 1990s. His most successful work, however, is a childrens book called Late For School, whose combination of surreal ideas and down to earth language proved a winning formula. Telling the story of a young boy whose journey to school becomes an adventure to rival that of Harry Potter, its hugely heartwarming, predictably hilarious and just the right amount of strange. Better still, it comes with a CD soundtrack of banjo music performed by Martin himself. Whats not to love?
