Publisher Description

It is a sweltering August in Aberystwyth. A man wearing a Soviet museum curator's uniform walks into Louie Knight's office and spins a wild and impossible tale of love, death, madness and betrayal. Sure, Louie had heard about Hughesovka, the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century czar. But he hadn't believed that it really existed until he met Uncle Vanya. Now the old man's story catapults him into the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom in search of a girl who mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago. Soon Louie finds his fate depending on two most unlikely talismans - -a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russian cosmonaut's sock.

Notes

The latest instalment in the wickedly funny Aberystwyth series, sees Louie Knight, the town's only private detective, swapping the train to Dovey Junction for the Orient Express and trying to unravel a murder mystery that is bizarre, even by his own exceptional standards. 'You'll weep and laugh on the same page. Wonderful' Guardian

Author Biography

Malcolm Pryce was born in the UK and has spent much of his life working and travelling abroad. He has been, at various times, a BMW assembly-line worker, a hotel washer-up, a deck hand on a yacht sailing the South Seas, an advertising copywriter and the world's worst aluminium salesman. In 1998 he gave up his day job and booked a passage on a banana boat bound for South America in order to write Aberystwyth Mon Amour. He spent the next seven years living in Bangkok, where he wrote three more novels in the series, Last Tango in Aberystwyth, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth and Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth. In 2007 he moved back to the UK and now lives in Oxford.

Review

'Malcolm Pryce is the king of Welsh noir and he dishes up a dastardly mix of gothic comedy where Edgar Allen Poe meets Phoenix Nights in a flurry of blood-stained absurdity' Sunday Telegraph 'Effortless and hilarious ... Pryce is in a league of his own' Time Out 'Inventive, funny and dark, Pryce packs more style into a sentence than most authors could hope for in volumes' Big Issue 'You'll weep and laugh on the same page. Wonderful' Guardian

Promotional

The fifth in Malcolm Pryce's cult Louie Knight series which has sold 200,000 copies through Bookscan and was recently re-jacketed with a stylish new noir look Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, 2010 For fans of Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, Mark Gattis, Giles Brandreth

Prizes

Short-listed for Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2010

Long Description

It is a sweltering August in Aberystwyth. A man wearing a Soviet museum curator's uniform walks into Louie Knight's office and spins a wild and impossible tale of love, death, madness and betrayal. Sure, Louie had heard about Hughesovka, the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century czar. But he hadn't believed that it really existed until he met Uncle Vanya. Now the old man's story catapults him into the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom in search of a girl who mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago. Soon Louie finds his fate depending on two most unlikely talismans - a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russia cosmonaut's sock.

Review Quote

'Malcolm Pryce is the king of Welsh noir and he dishes up a dastardly mix of gothic comedy where Edgar Allen Poe meets Phoenix Nights in a flurry of blood-stained absurdity'

Promotional "Headline"

The latest instalment in the wickedly funny Aberystwyth series sees Louie Knight, Aberystwyth's only private detective, swapping the train to Dovey Junction for the Orient Express and trying to unravel a murder mystery that is bizarre, even by his own exceptional standards ...

Details