Product Description
Running the Light (Paperback)
Author: Sam Tallent
Format: Paperback
‘Billy Ray Schafer stepped off the plane in Amarillo, Texas, with twenty-six hundred dollars tucked down the leg of his black ostrich-skin cowboy boot. He walked to baggage claim slowly, jelly-legged and nearing lucidity, coming out from under the Xanax he snorted before the flight…‘
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, he travels from hell gig to hell gig across the American Southwest in search of a reason to keep living. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray is the answer to a tragic question: What happens when opportunity never arrives? Or – worse – when it comes and goes?
‘THE BEST NOVEL I’VE EVER READ ABOUT COMEDY’ — Megan Nolan
‘GLORIOUSLY DEPRAVED’ — Geoff Dyer
‘LIT UP MY PLEASURE CENTRES AND LEFT ME STUNNED’ — Rob Doyle
‘Exceptional . . . Running the Light is Dante as gag artist, trapped in a Diabolical Comedy. Or maybe, in the end, a disgraced Odysseus searching for a way back home to contrition and forgiveness. Read it and weep’ — IRISH TIMES
‘Nothing I’ve read hits the psycho-chemical abyss of road life turned horribly wrong quite like this’ — LIAS SAOUDI
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