by WillWiles (Author)
The dark, doomy humour of Care of Wooden Floors mixed with the fantastical, anarchic sense of possibility of The Way Inn, brought together in a fast moving story set in contemporary London.
Jack Bick is an interview journalist at a glossy lifestyle magazine. From his office window he can see a black column of smoke in the sky, the result of an industrial accident on the edge of the city. When Bick goes from being a high-functioning alcoholic to being a non-functioning alcoholic, his life goes into freefall, the smoke a harbinger of truth, an omen of personal apocalypse. An unpromising interview with Oliver Pierce, a reclusive cult novelist, unexpectedly yields a huge story, one that could save his job. But the novelist knows something about Bick, and the two men are drawn into a bizarre, violent partnership that is both an act of defiance against the changing city, and a surrender to its spreading darkness.
With its rich emotional palette, Plume explores the relationship between truth and memory: personal truth, journalistic truth, novelistic truth. It is a surreal and mysterious exploration of the precariousness of life in modern London.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 352
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 16 May 2019
ISBN 10: 0008194416
ISBN 13: 9780008194413
`Wiles, a design and architecture journalist, has a magnificent sense of comic timing but also a handy way with sudden violence. As Double'slife begins to unravel under the weight of new revelations, even a clock radio seems to develop an ominous consciousness ... The Way Inn is Terence Conran meets HP Lovecraft. It is Bulgakov staged in the Tate, Kafka as a new Ikea furniture range. Wiles writes beautiful prose, stages exquisitely painful set-piece scenes of high comedy, and in Neil Double has created a John Self for the Marriott generation. The Way Inn is funny, clever and thrilling, its central conceit disturbing enough to demand that you read it outside, if you can.' Lloyd Shepherd, Guardian
`Chilling ... The twisted novelty of the central idea is neat and memorable.' Sunday Times
`An ingenious and smartly funny novel' Harry Ritchie, Daily Mail
`A follow-up to last year's Care Of Wooden Floors , taking a simple premise - a businessman staying in a chain of bland hotels - and horrifyingly turning it on its head. It'll make your skin crawl' Shortlist
Praise for `Care of Wooden Floors':
`Funny and richly poetic...a surreal, farcical, original first novel' The Times Books of the Year
`A very funny novel combining schadenfreude and belly laughs. Independent
`A terrific first novel, written with a very engaging deadpan wit, and an understated sense of the absurd.' Kate Saunders, The Times
`Ingenious ... his story has something in common, in terms of manic sensitivity, with Edgar Allan Poes' The Tell-Tale Heart...[with] deft and precise descriptive asides. This is a smart and polished debut.' Daily Telegraph
`This novel acquires the queasy allure of a cliff edge, the sense of impending catastrophe becoming strangely compelling ... Addictive and rather clever, too.' Daily Mail
`Funny, beguiling and quietly profound; a wonderfully well-crafted debut.' TLS
Will Wiles was born in India in 1978. He is a freelance journalist and has written about everything from Pot Noodles to jumbo jets. He once spent a week trying to find a Chihuahua skeleton.
He is the author of two novels, CARE OF WOODEN FLOORS (Fourth Estate, 2012) and THE WAY INN (Fourth Estate, 2014). CARE OF WOODEN FLOORS was a Waterstones 11 pick and won a Betty Trask award. He is currently working on his third novel, also to be published by Fourth Estate.