“Book Descriptions: The new book by the author of the Costa Prize shortlisted Ghost Town.
‘To become invisible is what I want most, the dream of disappearing.’
One morning in the 1970s Jeff Young slips out of his parents’ home with the intention of hitch-hiking to Paris in search of a version of himself he calls the wild twin – a shadow boy, a feral drifter. There he falls headlong into a fever dream of dive hotels, rough sleeping, getting lost, squats, violence, poverty, thieving, illness and madness. Journeying across Europe, from cathedral to doss-house, from Red Light District to deportation and breakdown, finally Young returns to present-day Liverpool, caring for his dying father in the house he ran away from fifty years before, remembering the past with a man who can no longer remember.
From the author of the Costa-shortlisted Ghost Town, Wild Twin is a hallucinatory dream book of loss and loneliness, a book of wild images, a love song to cities.