BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES - Tapa blanda

New Man: Remember him? Didn’t think so.

Simon Teller is the last of a dying breed. He’s such a New Man he’s sparkling. Struggling magician, gourmet cook, and jazz freak, he’s been doing Conversation and Quiche for as long as he can remember, but he’s so sensitive that all he’s managed to conjure up is a number of awkward crushes and infatuations. And now the women are staying away in droves.

Enter stage left Joe, the Houdini of the casual sex scene and the man who, in the cause of true friendship, is determined to show Simon how to pull women as easily as he pulls rabbits out of hats. Under Joe’s expert tutelage, and armed with an array of cynical – and secondhand – seduction techniques, Simon embarks on a radically different approach to dating. The results are disastrous. A number of close encounters of a very peculiar kind with desperate divorcées, nymphomaniac Canadians, and alcoholic doctors leave Simon wondering if the beautiful American magician Alex might be different...

A comedy about love, friendship and magic, and about how, sometimes, the trick is to see what’s before your very eyes.

Alex George is 28 years old, married and lives in London. He is a lawyer with Mishcon de Reya, who are actively supporting his career as a novelist, and in his spare time plays the saxaphone and writes restaurant and bar reviews for lawyers’ magazines.