Byron Easy - Hardcover

Daring, moving, imaginative and, above all, funny. This is a great debut from a promising novelist.

The style is impressively realistic and intelligent.

Ravishing in its evocations of beauty, sexual candor, suspense, and unusual insights into the soul-battering consequences of abuse and violence. Cook's debut gathers force as a rolling and rocking ballad of survival and love.

Jude Cook demonstrates a remarkable level of self-assurance in his command of language. An admirable piece of work and I can only commend Jude Cook for his ability to navigate this novel from beginning to end with such style and panache.

And now we have Byron Easy, the young hero of Jude Cook's first novel. Byron is a poet of the self-published and permanently wine-stained variety. Cook can clearly write. . . . [He] has written something new. This is certainly bold, a proud flourish of anti-wisdom.

It's December 24th, 1999. Byron Easy, a poverty-stricken poet, half-drunk and suicidal, sits on a train at King's Cross Station waiting to depart. In his lap is a backpack containing his remaining worldly goods—an empty wine bottle, a few books, a handful of crumpled banknotes. As the journey commences he conjures memories (both painful and euphoric) of the recent past, of his rollercoaster London life, and, most distressingly, of Mandy—his half-Spanish Amazonian wife—in an attempt to make sense of his terrible—and ordinary—predicament.What has led him to this point? Where are his friends, his family, his wife? What has happened to his dreams? And what disturbing plan awaits him at the end of his journey?Byron Easy is an epic, baroque, sprawling masterpiece of a novel—a unique portrait of love and marriage, of the flux of memory, and of England in the dying days of the twentieth century from a young British writer of exceptional promise.