Word: A Novel

Heyward Hoon is a young screenwriter whose work consistently falls in the honourable category of good-but-not-commercial-enough. About the only thing that keeps him going in LA (or Hell-A, as he calls it) is his enviable social life - good-looking and charming, he has an extremely wide circle of friends, many of them female. This is what makes him attractive to Sydney Swinburn, a heavyweight, studio-running movie mogul who has recently come out of a messy divorce and who, despite his money and status, has suddenly found his social life wanting. They meet at a party and reach a kind of unspoken agreement: Sydney will help Heyward with his career if Heyward helps Sydney get some dates. But as with all dodgy pacts, this one soon begins to founder. Heyward’s reputation takes a nose-dive as people start to regard him as little more than Sydney’s pimp, and active help with his career is always promised but never received. As the artificial world they had constructed comes crashing down around them, Heyward is forced to reassess his life and what he wants from it …