The Sound of My Voice: Winner of Prix Millepages and Prix Lucioles, both for Best Foreign Novel

‘Genuinely subversive, Butlin’s book is a stylistic triumph. A major novel’ - Irvine Welsh

Morris Magellan is thirty-four years old and already two-thirds destroyed. By day he is an executive, after six and at weekends the husband of an understanding wife and the father of two. At all times he is a music lover and a drunk.

Of the past he remembers only fear, and of the future he senses even greater terror to come; he is a man struggling from moment to moment to salvage something of himself before that too slips from his grasp.

On one level The Sound of My Voice tells the story of an alcoholic: a frantic attempt by some inner voice to halt an apparent need for self-destruction. More generally it presents the conflict between modern man’s cowardice and cruelty, and a desperate attempt to recover humanity.