Clownburn

"Like Hogarth painting with words"

"There hasn't been such an evocative description of place since Under Milk Wood"

"More than a story. I keep thinking about it long afterwards"

These are some early reviews of Clownburn on Amazon.

This is a novel that sets itself in the modern day while encompassing a thousand year sweep of history. As the book's protagonist walks the length of Kilburn High Road and observes the brokenness and destitution of modern London, Clownburn embraces Prester John, the Umayyid Caliphs and the Mughal Chittagongs. It visits kilim workshops in Jodhpur and ruined citadels baking beneath Somali skies, and follows trade winds to the Tasman Sea. It plays craps with nineteenth century ambassadors, fights bare knuckle butchers and mourns lost rivers. This is a book that quotes Faust, Dante and the Psalms; it is a love affair between a man and a woman and a man and a place. Wulfstan is the cursed man, condemned to walk the road between St Albans and Westminster - and back again - for ten centuries. A Benedictine monk entrusted with taking a sacred Bible into hiding in the wake of Viking raids, he meets and falls in love with Godwyn, a hermit nun whose cell is in the Great Middlesex Forest. They set up home in a nearby village and when Godwyn nears death during childbirth, Wulfstan sets off to fetch help. It is here that he meets his destiny on the road. Condemned to never return to his beloved, he spends the next millennium grieving her, wracked with guilt that she left her calling because of him, while he in turn abandoned her in her hour of greatest need. As Kilburn metastasises around the glade where Godwyn prayed, Wulfstan sees its mess, brokenness and decay as his fault, a visceral reminder of his own failure and sin. Like a landbound Flying Dutchman, he walks forever north and south, fuelled by fury and self-loathing. We join him on the final day of his life as prepares to get the jump on the Devil and go out with a bang of his own making.