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Running the Light

'The best novel I've ever read about comedy' Megan Nolan

By: Sam Tallent

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Hardcover | 15 May 2025 | Edition Number 1

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'A thrilling, nauseating and painfully real depiction of what happens as youth, talent and charisma sour' MEGAN NOLAN

'Anyone wondering where The Great American Novel went: this is it on bail' DBC PIERRE

Debauched, divorced and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living, in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father - comedian is the only title Schafer has left.

Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when opportunity doesn't come - or worse - it comes and goes?

In 'a majestically bleak, hilarious and bruising tour of regret, delusion and the detonation of the soul' (Sam Lipsyte), Tallent hurls you into an absolute mess of a man's life as we search for the mercy he does not want.

Industry Reviews

Thrilling, nauseating and painfully real . . . Running the Light is the best novel I've ever read about comedy . . . Sam Tallent is that rare thing: a funny person who can convey his funniness in fiction and do it alongside prose that will break your heart too. - Megan Nolan

Chaotic bliss . . . vivid, electric . . . reads like cinema - The Denver Post

Running the Light is a majestically bleak, hilarious, and bruising tour of regret, delusion, and the detonation of the soul . . . If there is a comedy club in hell and they have a merch table, this is the only book on it - Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and No One Left to Come Looking for You

A gripping, raw, brutal, messy portrait of the life of an out-of-control road comic, full of drugs, booze, blood, sex, and a few jokes - Marc Maron, stand-up comedian and podcaster

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