Byron Easy - Jude Cook

It's 24 December, 1999. Byron Easy, a poverty-stricken poet - half-cut and suicidal - sits on a stationary train at King's Cross waiting to depart. In his lap is a bag containing his remaining worldly goods: an empty bottle of red wine, a few books, a handful of crumpled banknotes. He is on the run. Not from the usual writer's trouble - money trouble, soul trouble - but special trouble, of a type you may have problems identifying with at first.

As the journey commences, he conjures memories (painful and comic alike) of the recent past, of his roller-coaster London life, and of Mandy - his Amazonian wife - in an attempt to make sense of his terrible, and ordinary, predicament.

So what has led him to this point? Where are his friends, his family? What happened to his dreams? And what awaits him at the end of his odyssey north?

Byron Easy is an epic, baroque sprawling monster of a novel, and a unique portrait of love and marriage, of the flux of memory, and of England in the dying days of the twentieth century by a young British writer of exceptional promise.