Perilously ill, Jasper Scriven spends his days roaming the wards of a derelict psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile his daughter Cleo is watched by Roland, a hulking, silent figure. These solitary characters are connected by an event that defies understanding, even as it continues to define them. In this brilliantly imagined and disturbing novel, James Scudamore explores the fallibility of memory and the notions of madness.
Born in a shantytown, Ludo leaves, and returns on the opposite side of its social divide. Now he sells unaffordable products to the underclass into which he was born. He has an obsessive love for his adoptive sister, while her husband is his only friend. This is the story of a man whose destiny controls him and takes him to the brink of madness.
Anti, a quiet English boy living in Quito, Ecuador, strikes up a friendship with flamboyant classmate Fabian, who is everything Anti isn't: handsome, athletic and popular. What's more, he lives with his rakish Uncle Suarez, while Anti is stuck in the dull ex-pat world inhabited by his parents. Suarez, a storyteller par excellence, infects the boys with his passion for outlandish tales, and before long their relationship becomes one conducted entirely through the medium of storytelling. One subject, however, is taboo: Fabian's parents...
