Files

7½ /
Read by Lex Marinos. A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away, he becomes lost in memory and beauty. He also begins to tell us a story. A retired porn star is made an offer he can't refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of past temptations and long-buried desires. Can he resist the oblivion they promise? A breathtakingly audacious novel by the acclaimed author of The Slap and Damascus, about finding joy and beauty in a raging and punitive world, about the refractions of memory and time and, most subversive of all, about the mystery of art and its creation.