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

'I absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable - which is to say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending' Megan Nolan

'Beautiful, intricately humane, and gut-wrenchingly funny . . . I haven't been so excited by a debut novel in a long time' Luke Kennard

'One of the wittiest, sharpest, cruellest critiques of literary culture I've ever read' Independent

'Whip-smart. Maddening. Weirdly hypnotic. I loved it' Telegraph

'100 pages in, I was thinking, "Why bother with anything else? Why bother with lunch?"' Guardian

At the Travelodge bar near Waterloo bridge, the unnamed narrator of Dead Souls meets the disgraced poet Solomon Wiese, and hears the story of his spectacular fall from grace - a story that will take the entire night to tell.

Wiese's story involves a plagiarism scandal, the death of an old poet, a love affair with a woman carrying a signpost, a retreat to the East Anglian countryside, and his plans for a triumphant return to the capital - plans in which our unnamed narrator discovers he is obscurely implicated ...