Neon Noon

He is a bruised man, adrift, keening for a lost love. His sorrow submerges everything: his agony is truest, his epiphanies greatest. Do you despise him? You’re too late. He despises himself already.

This is his story: Anne-Marie, his true love, has left him and their Mumbai flat. There is a girl who pretends to be a lesbian with whom he has an awkward encounter of the almost-coital kind. And then, when he goes to Pattaya looking for sex (when he could have gone to Interlaken looking for love), he finds Noon, just the sort of woman who might mend – and break again – his wounded heart; and he finds Orhan, who may or may not be the son he never had.

Here is a debut at once pensive and feral, cutting down to our most private tragedies – and to that shameful inference we must all some day come to: we are neither heroes nor insects.