Byron Easy

On the evening of 24 December 1999, a struggling poet named Byron Easy sits on a train at King's Cross, bound for a journey he seems unsure he will survive. Everything he owns fits in the backpack on his knees: an empty wine bottle, a few well-worn books, and a little crumpled cash. As the train pulls away, his thoughts drift back over the recent past, through the ups and downs of his life in London and, most painfully, to Mandy, his wife, whose background is half Spanish and who is described as an Amazonian figure.

How did he arrive at this moment? Where have his friends, his family and his wife gone, and what has become of the ambitions he once held? The novel follows his attempt to piece together an ordinary sequence of events that has turned into a crisis, and it leaves open what he intends to do once the train reaches its destination.

Broad in scope and dense in style, the book is a sprawling portrait of love and marriage, of how memory shifts and folds back on itself, and of England at the close of the twentieth century. It is the debut-stage work of a young British writer.