The novel takes its premise from the plot of Shakespeare's play King Lear, narrated from the perspective of the character of the Fool, whose name is Pocket.

While the style of Fool is directed at an American audience, the author incorporates at times Shakespearean vocabulary, archaic syntax, and modern British slang, and obscure cultural terms relating to medieval life, which are explained in footnotes.

While successful in this, Pocket fails to incite civil war, simply because Cordelia – now a veritable warrior queen – invades Britain with her army from France.

A 2009 review in Entertainment Weekly gave the novel a "B", arguing that "Trapped by calamity, Moore loses his focus to the bloody challenge of finding funny in a bunch of crazy people wandering the cliffs of Dover and dying in droves".

[1] The novel debuted in fourth place on the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction, according to the online issue for February 20, 2009.