M.J. Nicholls is the author of TRIMMING ENGLAND (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2020), SCOTLAND BEFORE THE BOMB (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2019), THE 1002ND BOOK TO READ BEFORE YOU DIE (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2018), THE QUIDDITY OF DELUSION (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2017), THE HOUSE OF WRITERS (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2016), and A Postmodern Belch. He lives in Glasgow.

“If his previous novels put a wry smile on your face, Scotland Before The Bomb will have you laughing out loud. At times it’s Jerry Seinfeld meets Laurence Sterne meets Kathy Acker, at others it’s like Samuel Beckett’s Alice in Wonderland…. Scotland Before The Bomb is that rarest of literary beasts—a satirical, witty, and considered comic novel which is deadly serious at its core…. [It’s] unlike any other novel you’ll have read before unless you have read M.J. Nicholls. And if you haven’t you absolutely should. He could just be your new favourite writer—you just don’t know it yet.” – Alistair Braidwood, Scots Whay Hae

“Packed with everything from bogus Trip Advisor reviews to memoirs, interviews, haikus and a densely-packed seven-page list of reasons to be miserable, Nicholls’ latest is an impressive outpouring of imaginative, seemingly inexhaustible absurdity pitched somewhere between Alasdair Gray and Spike Milligan.” —Alastair Mabbott, Heraldscotland.com

“There’re heaping helpings of dystopia and absurdity in M.J. Nicholls’s Scotland before the Bomb, a sprawling chronicle in which a Scottish independence vote fractured the country into dozens of tiny nation states. Presented in the form of archived entries compiled by a researcher from the twenty-second century, each of the book’s entries documents the rise and fall of the nations. Rampantly imaginative, the book pokes fun at every sort of human folly and hubris…. a linguistically acrobatic novel that’s filled with zany wit and sheer randomness.” —Ho Lin, Foreword Reviews

“There is no more difficult task for a writer than a comic novel. An epic poem is nothing compared to it. Many have tried, most have failed. P.G. Wodehouse made it look so easy for so long that Evelyn Waugh called him not merely the greatest humorist, or the greatest comic novelist, but the greatest writer of the 20th century. Let that statement sink in for a bit. It is not nearly as ridiculous as it might seem at first glance. Then get a cold, damp cloth and mop your fevered brow, for you will need to have your wits about you when you dive into Scotland Before the Bomb by M.J. Nicholls. Open it anywhere. I defy you to find a page without laughter in it, and what’s more, laughter that resonates. This is without question the comic novel of the year, quite possibly the decade. It is humor on a grand scale, and also humor down to the tiniest, most absurd, radioactive details. Nicholls employs a fiendishly clever premise straight out of Borges by way of Spike Milligan—a novel disguised as post-apocalyptic reportage—to send up almost every current hallucination and article of faith held dear by the citizens of his beloved, bedeviled homeland, not to mention greater Europe. Like every significant work of art, this one is very much of its time while also being carefully crafted to last into a different, and one hopes better, era.” —Kurt Luchs