A comic novel

The Perpetual Astonishment of Jonathon Fairfax

• You can now buy this book on Kindle for about £2
• It’ll be available from Amazon in paperback for about £6 – from 10 June 2012

This is a comic thriller about Jonathon Fairfax, a young, slightly useless part-time Harrods sales assistant who inadvertently brings down the government. It also includes a man who runs a cosy murdering firm from home, an evil whimsical politician, a cool man who is either a private detective or a loss adjustor, a woman who learns that she is not old, and a token dead character.

Quite a few of the people I’ve showed it to have liked it. In fact, it got me signed up by the famous literary agency Curtis Brown, but they didn’t manage to sell it to a publisher. Melissa, my agent, says that this is because publishers are very cautious at the moment and have a superstitious fear of trying to launch new writers of black comedy. She warned me when she took me on that this was very likely to stop them buying it, but said she wanted to give it a try. Of course, it might also be that they just didn’t like it very much.

Self-publishing is still quite an embarrassing thing to do, even now it’s so comparatively cheap and easy. I think that if I didn’t have an agent, I would have felt too modest to publish this. Even now, I feel I must say that if you’re thinking of buying this book out of a sense of obligation – because you’re a friend or relation – you really shouldn’t. I’d hate to think of anyone buying it if it isn’t their sort of thing.

So whose sort of thing is it?

In times of trouble, one of the books I go back to is Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams. I wanted to do something with a similar feel – something that tells you, ‘Yes, the world really is insane. We’ve noticed it too. Don’t worry.’ Something that I could have read on the Tube in the morning when I had a horrible temp job at Andersen Consulting after graduating. Something that would have taken the edge off the horror. Something I could have disappeared into for a while.

If you fancy something like that, then it might be your sort of thing. To find out more you can …

• Look at the front cover
• Read the back-cover blurb
• Read the first three chapters
• Find out how I published it (coming soon)