Dave Gorman Bücher

If someone called you a 'googlewhack' what would you do? Would you end up playing table tennis with a nine year-old boy in Boston? Would you find yourself in Los Angeles wrangling snakes, or would you go to China to be licked by a performance artist? If your name is Dave Gorman, then all of these things could be true. Fuelled by a lust for life and a desperate desire to do anything except what he's supposed to be doing (writing that novel and growing up), Dave falls under the spell of an obscure internet word game - Googlewhacking. Addicted to the game, and gripped by obsession, Dave travels three times round the world, visiting four continents and the unlikeliest cast of real life eccentrics you'll ever meet in what becomes an epic challenge, a life-changing, globe-trotting Googlewhack adventure.

But when his road trip mutates into an odyssey of near-epic proportions and he finds himself being threatened at gun point in Mississippi, Dave starts to worry about what's going to break down next.

It's hard to imagine a world where anything you could possibly want to know about - and everything you don't even know you want to know about - isn't accessible 24-hours a day, seven days a week, with just a few taps of our fingers.

So he knocked on the biggest door you could ever imagine - the internet - and asked 76,000 people if they fancied a game. From casual players to serious game geeks, from the rank amateur to the world champion, he discovered a nation of gamers more than happy to welcome him into their midst.