A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering – by Andrew Hunter Murray

23 08 2025

Very different from his first novel (and I haven’t read his second!) – the premise of this book sounded so much fun: a guy who house sits for rich people, except they don’t know it. You might call him a squatter, he calls himself an interloper. He stays in wealthy people’s second homes when he knows they’re away, and leaves no trace – fun, yes?!

I thought the whole book was going to be based around this, and in a way it is, but really it’s more that that’s the set up for the story, which is sort of a murder mystery while on the run as suspects. I don’t think that gives too much away as it’s on the back of the book! It’s even narrated from the information suite in his prison…

I really enjoyed it, there’s a good amount of fun among the drama, and a few niche British references that would make Richard Osman proud! (eg: “I wonder fleetingly whether the police and the Bake Off crew get their marquees from the same firm.”).

There was also a wonderful anecdote about Ann Hicks, who sold apples in Hyde Park in the 1830s, built a tiny shack to sell from, gradually added to it, windows, doors, extended upwards, until she had a two storey house and a shop front in the middle of Hyde Park. Due to patchy records, she ended up being paid a weekly allowance by the Duke of Wellington to leave so they could build a bit crystal palace – a brilliant story, and clearly Hunter Murray’s QI-elf-ness hasn’t completely left him!

I think what I’d really like is a prequel, maybe a series of short stories of his escapades before this whole incident kicked off, of life as an interloper. It’s fun in this book to learn of his series of rules of interloping, but there must be stories from where some of them came from that could be a good premise.

A couple of excellent lines:

  • “I have a faint memory that impersonating a police officer is a crime that comes with an especially long sentence. The police don’t like it when you do impressions of them. (I find this particularly unfair, because apparently they’re allowed to do impressions of normal people and that’s just ‘undercover work’.)”
  • “You may have noticed that I’ve also changed Qumar’s name, from a country you will be familiar with to a fake country they use in The West Wing when they needed somewhere for President Bartlet to bomb. If Aaron Sorkin objects to me lifting the name, he can sue me. I’m literally writing this from prison and have no fear of copyright infringement.”
  • “I do look up the price of ferry tickets, then a few property portals to see how much the average mountain chalet sets you back these days (a lot, it turns out; these ski people must be made of money and still they choose to go somewhere cold? Insane)”

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The Last Day – by Andrew Hunter Murray

1 05 2021

I was fascinated by the concept of this book. The year is 2059, 30 years after the Earth stopped spinning, after gradually slowing down between 2020 and 2029. The plant is now in lock-step with the sun, and so half the world is in cold darkness, half is scorching hot, and life only exists on the border between the two – interesting!

The book is set in the UK, where the sun is low in the sky as if just after dawn – this is one of the things I found hardest to keep straight in my mind, e.g. when the character returned home in an evening, in my head it was dark, and I frequently found myself having to completely reimagine scenes as they would have been!

As the author also happens to be a QI elf, the book explains what caused the rotation of the Earth to slow, some of the more detailed affects that has had, which make it much more satisfying for a logistical brained person like me! Things like: how the first day of The Slow, was only 0.144 seconds longer than the previous day, but how that in itself was enough to collapse GPS systems worldwide, how 15 months into the slow, countries were adding Dead Air to their days to cope with them lengthening, but how England updated Eurotunnel timetables daily, and France weekly, so after a while, there was a crash, and how houses have been adapted to simulate day and night with reflective shutters so people still have a chance to sleep properly.

I have one outstanding niggle, which is why the earth stopped spinning and and the deceleration didn’t continue into starting to spin the other way, but that might just be my lack of understanding – hopefully I will lend it to my dad at some point, and then he can explain it to me!

In all honesty, it’s these bits of the book I found most interesting, how it would all happen, rather than the ‘plot’ which involves Ellen Hopper trying to uncover a secret that the government wants to keep hidden, although that was interesting too, just not what gripped my attention and imagination the most!

Just two quotes to share from this book:

At one point, someone who remembers life before The Stop is talking about it and says “I always think it must have been better to be Cain than Adam,. No memory of paradise.”

And later on, “Everyone says they’re opposite endeavours, politics and science, that one deals with truth and the other with perception.”


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