Wild Twin by Jeff Young

‘A surging heart-song in which the narrator/confessor moves from reading and appreciating the books and the performers we all admired in that fondly remembered yesterday to joining their company. As poet of witness and happenstance. A moving panorama of vivid detail and rapid Kerouac sketching culled from one life with its pains and epiphanies. The prose flies but knows just when to pause and take stock.’ Iain Sinclair

‘There is much loss in Wild Twin, of youth, time, place and people, but kindness warms every page; the kindness of strangers he meets who give willingly when they’ve little to give and a deeper, more complex strain that grows into Wild Twin’s deeply affecting final pages. Charlie Connelly, The New European

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.

With collage illustrations by the author.

Praise for Ghost Town:

‘a book of plangent beauty and longing’ Anthony Quinn

‘…sonorous, lyrical, sensual.’ Paula Byrne

‘Riveting.’ Alan O’Hare

Published 18th September 2024, hardback.

Orders will be recorded and sent out on publication.