Running the Light: 'The best novel I've ever read about comedy' Megan Nolan

'A thrilling, nauseating and painfully real depiction of what happens as youth, talent and charisma sour' MEGAN NOLAN 'Anyone wondering where The Great American Novel went: this is it on bail' DBC PIERRE Debauched, divorced and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living, in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father - comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when opportunity doesn't come - or worse - it comes and goes? In 'a majestically bleak, hilarious and bruising tour of regret, delusion and the detonation of the soul' (Sam Lipsyte), Tallent hurls you into an absolute mess of a man's life as we search for the mercy he does not want.