Like a tourist visiting his own life, David Gilmour's narrator journeys in time to re-examine those critical moments that created him. He revisits the terrible hurt of a first love, the shock of a parent's suicide, the trauma of a best friend's bizarre dissembling, and the pain and humiliation of unrelenting jealousy, among other rites of passage.

In fact, here is the narrator of David Gilmour's previous novels writing his own fictional autobiography in a dazzling cavalcade of stories that punctuate a life passionately lived and loved. Set within an episodic narrative arc, here are stories about the profound effect of Tolstoy, of the Beatles, of the cult of celebrity, of the delusion of drugs, and of the literary life on the winding road of the narrator's progress.

This compelling and deeply interesting picaresque novel is a creative tour de force from the hand of one our master story-tellers. The Perfect Order of Things breaks new fictional ground and is an astonishing story of a life lived fully and with breathtaking passion.