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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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Paperback | 13 May 2025 | Edition Number 1

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'Billy Ray Schafer stepped off the plane in Amarillo, Texas, with twenty-six hundred dollars tucked down the leg of his black ostrich-skin cowboy boot. He walked to baggage claim slowly, jelly-legged and nearing lucidity, coming out from under the Xanax he snorted before the flight.'

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 vivid, electric sentences that read like cinematic tracking shots,' (Denver Post) Tallent hurls you into an absolute mess of a man's life as we search for the mercy he does not want.

Industry Reviews

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 - author of ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS

Brilliant writing . . . astounding . . . One of the best books I've read. Ever

Tallent's exploration of a working week at the human border where darkness spawns comedy is as bright as organs in a jar . . . Anyone wondering where The Great American Novel went: this is it on bail - author of VERNON GOD LITTLE

At once an unforgettable and moving character portrait and a scorching vision of ecstatic self-annihilation - author of THRESHOLD

Heartache and disgust in equal measure. Pure style the whole way. Essential reading - co-author of TEN THOUSAND APOLOGIES

So parallel to the down-and-out-world of a DIY band touring across the pits of America written in a style evoking the life with such vividness that I was bummed out all the way through it. It's that good! - musician and author of IN THE JINGLE JANGLE JUNGLE

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