‘I absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable - which is to say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending’ Megan Nolan

‘Beautiful, intricately humane, and gut-wrenchingly funny … I haven’t been so excited by a debut novel in a long time’ Luke Kennard

‘One of the wittiest, sharpest, cruellest critiques of literary culture I’ve ever read’ Independent

‘Whip-smart. Maddening. Weirdly hypnotic. I loved it’ Telegraph

‘100 pages in, I was thinking, Why bother with anything else? Why bother with lunch? ’ Guardian

At the Travelodge bar near Waterloo bridge, the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls meets the disgraced poet Solomon Wiese, and hears the story of his spectacular fall from grace - a story that will take the entire night to tell.

Wiese’s story involves a plagiarism scandal, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, a retreat to the East Anglian countryside, and his plans for a triumphant return to the capital - plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated …