Richard Milward

Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London purveyor of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century.

Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a ‘fantabulosa crime’ in 276 days that will revolt the world. A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Paris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter - but, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever intended.

Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire and Jean Genet's jailbird fantasies, Man-Eating Typewriter is an act of seductive sedition by a writer with unfathomable literary talent and boldness. Wild, transgressive, erotic and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making; a book that will be talked about, celebrated and puzzled over for decades.

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