The world of Karl Pilkington

This is a collection of the best moments from the "Ricky Gervais Show" podcasts - the world's number one podcast - with additional musings and original drawings by Karl Pilkington, the show's unlikely star.

Karl Pilkington, the Confutian like savant of the "Ricky Gervais Podcast" show, has led an extraordinary and curiously individual life.

As a kid, growing up in Manchester, he regularly missed school to accompany his parents on caravanning holidays and left without collecting his exam results: his family weaned him well.

His father once crashed a train into Manchester Central Station, his mother shaved one of their cats after it kept being sick and his uncle slept in a dinghy instead of a bed - genes, some acolytes say, which have contributed to his cryptic views on life.

Pilkington's is a brilliant mind, locked inside a perfectly round head, and uncluttered by the unhelpful constraints of logic or common sense; factors that have lead him to such dazzling insights as 'you never see old men eating Twix bars' or that the "Diary" of Anne Frank was 'an Adrian Mole sort of thing'.In this pithy and hilarious book, Karl is in conversation with (the often bewildered) Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the writers and stars of "The Office" and "Extras", outwitting even these comedy Goliaths with his take on such contentious issues as charity, the lack of Chinese homeless people, re-incarnation, the rights of monkeys and favourite superpowers.

Featuring Karl's original illustrations, imaginative scribblings, full colour pictures sent in by fans, the best conversations of the first 12 podcasts, and to be published alongside the second series of the internationally acclaimed and Guinness Record-winning "Ricky Gervais Podcast Show" (downloaded over 4,000,000 times - the most popoular podcast ever), this is a unique trip into the world of one of our most innovative thinkers, visionaries and prophets, or as Gervais and Merchant know him, 'the funniest man alive in Britain today'.