Dead Souls

An extraordinary debut novel from an award-winning poet, about poets, plagiarism, love, technology, feuds and affairs, cancellation and revenge, and how writing really does alter reality

DEAD SOULS follows the course of a single big night - most of which is spent in the bar at the Travelodge just off Waterloo Bridge. There the unnamed narrator meets Solomon Wiese, a poet who has been ostracized by the community after failing to pass a technology-based authenticity test. Solomon Wiese's account of his rise and fall is a story that takes him the entire night and the remainder of the novel to tell. It is a story that touches on - amongst many other things - childhood encounters with 'nothingness', a retreat to the east of England, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, and Wiese's plans for a triumphant return to the capital, through the theft of poems, illegal war profits and faked social media accounts - plans in which the narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated...