Guy Simpson works in the City of London. A young, brash, amoral Foreign Exchange dealer, he leads a life of hedonistic excess - of drugs and sex and alcohol - until two events serve to shatter his outlook, forever. First he discovers an ex-girlfriend is pregnant, then his beloved two-year-old niece becomes permanently brain-damaged. From these two junctures he spirals into despair and self-destructive savagery until, at the end, he tries to take life, and death, in hand.

Absent Fathers is an elegant, disturbing, erotic novel that addresses the confilcts of masculinity with a subtly philosophical wit, against the background of a marvellously realised modern London. It is as contentious as it is memorable.