Fiction. A man of no known origin and unstable personality tries to re-enter society after a long and unexplained absence. The reader sees events through Jack's mostly uncomprehending eyes as he negotiates the margins of a London that resembles the city of memory and story only in incidental details. Replete with episodes of manic religion and delusions, the world in SWEET ENGLAND is hard, dark, dangerous. Exploitation and violence provide a steady background glow that illuminates Jack's relationship with Brenda, with whom he is living, drinking, brawling, and loving. Weiner's London is equally a protagonist of his story. Dirty, somber, the city is a palimpsest, the contemporary curry houses and mosques reinscribing the landscape dotted with old churches, monuments and graveyards that invoke old England's Christian saints and glorious past.

Author City: VANCOUVER, BC CAN

SWEET ENGLAND is Steve Weiner's third novel. His debut in 1993, The Museum of Love, was a Giller Prize finalist, and was published in the UK, Japan, France and Belgium, and by Overlook Press in North America. His second novel was The Yellow Sailor (2001). Weiner's books have been compared to the novels of C éline and Burroughs, and the films of Lynch and Cronenberg. Weiner lives in Vancouver.