Description

‘To become invisible is what I want most, the dream of disappearing.’
One morning in the 1970s Jeff Young slips out of his parents home with the intention of hitch-hiking to Paris in search of a version of himself he calls the ‘wild twin,’ a shadow boy, a feral drifter. There he falls headlong into a fever dream of dive hotels, rough sleeping, getting lost, squats, violence, poverty, thieving, illness and madness. Journeying across Europe, from cathedrals to doss houses, from Red Light district to deportation and breakdown, finally Young returns to present-day Liverpool, caring for his dying father in the house he ran away from fifty years earlier, remembering the past with a man who can no longer remember.
From the author of the Costa Prize shortlisted Ghost Town, Wild Twin is a hallucinatory dream book of loss and loneliness, a book of wild images and a love song to cities.
Praise for Ghost Town: ‘a book of plangent beauty and longing.’ Anthony Quinn, ‘sonorous, lyrical, sensuous.’ Paula Byrne. ‘Riveting.’ Alan O’Hare.

Publisher Review

'A moving panorama of vivid detail and rapid Kerouac sketching culled from one life with its pains and epiphanies.' Iain Sinclair 'There are obvious comparisons to be made with Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts...Bouth journeys were recalled in middle age and were exercises in vagrant penury, sleeping in fields and barns and accepting the charity of strangers.' Charlie Connelly, New European.