Zack is a crawler. He’s been crawling all his life. He has an instinct for it, a skill for cancelling out all those sucking noises you make when your palms and knees rise out of the mud. He has an ear for the ditch’s subtler traffic too: the bubblings, chitterings, chuckles and gasps, the slow drownings and the unexpected surfacings.
Zack’s ditch - sometimes a tunnel, sometimes a corridor or a blood-drenched capillary - leads us through a warren of memories and current experiences, from the surrealism of childhood to the baseness of his present life - the breakdown of his marriage and his petty acts of revenge against his wife Elinor.

John Latham’s first novel constructs an Escher-like maze of what ifs and what nows. Thronging with characters, many of who play only bit parts in Zack’s actual life, this is a journey through the unattended subplots of our lives, the on-going narrative that subconscious itself weaves together.


‘Spectacular writing, with lines that hang around in the mind long after you’ve read them.’
- Ian McMillan