Wild Twin

In Wild Twin, the Costa Prize shortlisted author Jeff Young sets out from Liverpool in the 1970s pursuing a vision of becoming a 'wild twin'. In Europe he falls into a fever dream of drugs, dive hotels, poverty, madness and thieving. An extraordinary memoir, a hallucinatory dream book of loss and loneliness, to match his debut 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 cathedrals to doss houses, 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 earlier, remembering the past with a man who can no longer remember. From the author of the Costa Prize shortlisted Ghost Town, Wild Twin is a hallucinatory dream book of loss and loneliness, a book of wild images and a love song to cities. Praise for Ghost Town: 'a book of plangent beauty and longing.' Anthony Quinn, 'sonorous, lyrical, sensuous.' Paula Byrne. 'Riveting.' Alan O'Hare.