Shark

On a sunny spring day at the beginning of the 1970s psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner and his fellow residents at the Concept House therapeutic community in north London drop acid. At the peak of this ill-advised (and, for some of them, not entirely voluntary) trip, Michael Lincoln, British observer on the Hiroshima A-bomb mission, arrives at the House and comes face to face with inmate Claude Evenrude, a survivor of the Japanese sinking of the USS Indianapolis in the shark-infested Pacific. As the day progresses, and the acid takes hold, the threads of consciousness of the participants unravel, and their nightmares and memories are woven into an hallucinogenic tapestry of events from which there seems neither escape nor redemption.

'Breathtaking and dazzling. An exhilarating tour-de-force . . . immersing the reader in a trippy Odyssey.' Daily Mail

'Will challenge and disturb, exasperate and entertain. Never less than sharp, biting and incisive. Prepare to be eaten whole.' Independent

'Truly wonderful, truly harrowing, hilarious. Exciting, mesmerizing, wonderfully disturbing. Go with it and it will suck you under.' Daily Telegraph

'A torrent of war, death, madness and 20th-century horror . . . superb.' Observer

'Dazzling. Metaphors morph into memories and sentences are swilled around and intermingled like fish guts in a chum bucket.' Esquire

'Impressive, highly enjoyable, vividly, even profoundly imagined. Self is creating something rather grand.' Sunday Times