My Eliot

Lost in the house he grew up in, haunted by the ghost of his younger sister and his strange, cruel parents, and with the love of his life, Paula, spinning around town with the man she left him for, our narrator, Donald Antrim, is feeling unmoored - bordering on undone. It's time, he decides, to embark on a project that will allow him to understand his late father and himself, to figure out what went wrong with his relationship, and to maybe pull himself out of his misery: he sets out to write a book on everything that his father, an amateur cobbler and esteemed scholar of T.S. Eliot, stood for, and why it was wrong.

But instead of writing his book, Donald spends his time in hallucinatory jaunts in the forest, spending time with the technicolour trees, talking to a possum named Tom, pursuing the phantom of a little boy and trying to win back his beloved Paula. Because when there's a magical new drug to be smoked, an enchanted wood and a witch just down the road, who can focus on trying to describe the beauty and torment of life in words?

Delirious, haunting, moving - and presided over by the ghost of T.S. Eliot - Antrim's first novel in more than twenty-five years offers something beyond resolution or escape: the knowledge that past even the darkest despair is the promise of transcendence to an existence far stranger and more magnificent than our own.