Patrick Oxtoby is 23 when his fiancée tells him she can’t marry him. He leaves home for a boarding house by the sea. He fantasises a bit about breaking his fiancée’s spine, but focuses on the people he meets in his new town. Shaun Flindall and Ian Welkin, the other two men in the boarding house, make him feel left out by talking about London, and by being carefree and confident. He gets drunk as an anaesthetic, but is not very good at it. He flirts with a waitress, but she is kind rather than impressed. His mother comes to visit and he is crueller to her than he meant to be. As Patrick’s social failures mount, his frustration reveals itself in increasingly mad ways until he takes a disproportionate revenge.
M. J. Hyland won the Encore and the Hawthornden Awards and was shortlisted for the Booker prize for her second novel Carry Me Down.
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