I bought this book for £2 from Tesco in their book sale and I have to say that I am glad I didn't pay full price for it! I bought it for some light holiday reading, which I suppose it was but it did struggle to hold my attention. I had high hopes due to the praise of the hilarity of it all and quite enjoyed Millington's Guardian writing. But for me it really didn't make the cut.

The story is about Pel, an Englishman who gets caught up in the politics and pitfalls of his "promotions" and how he winds up in a rather tricky situation with a Chinese gang. Pel lives with his German girlfriend, Ursula, who is rather to the point and hasn't quite mastered the intricacies of English etiquette. She wants to move from the area they are in because it's unsafe and there are appearances of their arguments based upon this.

The main reason I picked this book was because I expected from the title and blurb for it to be more about the relationship between Pel and Ursula and be a humorous account of the difficulties of they faced with their cultural differences. Instead it mostly focuses on Pel and mostly portrays Ursula as a side line to the main plot, which revolves around his job. Ursula makes the odd nagging appearance and even then I found it mundane. I found myself skim reading the book just to get to the end of it and I can't really say that the ending was worth the effort.

It was easy reading and there were parts that I found very funny but I just wish that the book had been more towards what the title suggested and that he had tried less to be constantly funny and moved the plot along a little faster. I thought I would relate to this book having been in a German/English relationship but I just couldn't and felt it was an exagerrated steriotype. I also couldn't connect to any of the characters. I found Pel sloppy and at times arrogant and his friends made such fleeting appearances, I couldn't get used to any of them.

However this is just my opinion and a few others who I passed this on to really enjoyed it. Maybe I am just too defensive of the Germans!