In these exquisitely rendered poems, people fall in and out of love, in and out of religious belief and in and out of accepting the distance between their imagined lives and the lives they live. They look back as much as forward and pick mercilessly at the open wounds of failed relationships.
Simon and Auden Triller are twins whose only similarity is the surname they share. From an early age, Simon’s life is filled with academic and athletic accomplishments, friends and adults who admire him.
Following the violent death of his father, Gershwin Burr descends into a seemingly inescapable depression until, not-so-accidentally, he discovers a remedy for his condition: he steals a book and finds his mood has lightened. Before long, he’s stealing indiscriminately while refining his skills as a professional thief and amassing a small fortune.
At the centre of this unusual novel of chapter-long sentences lies an unusual protagonist. The survivor of a near-catastrophic fall, he finds himself possessed by peculiar, residual behaviours, the most peculiar of which is a compulsion to expel every drop of pleasure from his life by filling it with repetitive tasks and activities.