Charlie Big Potatoes: A Novel - Tapa dura

"I collapsed in this same club four years ago and was resuscitated by a smackhead, who pulled me into the toilets, ran my wrists under the cold tap, and slapped me 'round the face -- at the same time giving me the A to Z of self-medication. I've performed the same service for others since. It makes me sad when people say that my generation has learned nothing worth passing on."

Charlie Marshall is not a man who should be getting married. When Charlie, a twenty-five-year-old magazine writer, returns home to London after his New York bachelor party, his arm is broken -- the result of being thrown out of a bar after lighting his boss's hair on fire -- and he is nursing the effects of a near fatal overdose. He arrives wasted at his own wedding, where the sight of his fiancée, Sarah, in a big white dress, mixed with the expectations of two large families, prove to be the final toxic cocktail for a man who has been wide awake for five days. He crumbles to the floor at the altar.

In the aftermath of his abject failure, Charlie is buried by the harsh realities of his parents' deteriorating marriage, his feckless, hedonistic friends, and his massive desire to drink. When Sarah goes on what was to be their honeymoon with one of his best friends, Charlie's downward spiral is complete, and there is only one thing he can do. He checks himself into rehab and begins an affair with a suicidal self-mutilator. But instead of love, Charlie finds only memories of Sarah. He becomes desperate to earn back his life with her. No longer numbed by various substances and battling the absurdity of his hospital group sessions, Charlie decides he's got to make some changes on his own, and his biggest hope is that Sarah will take notice.

Charlie Big Potatoes is at once entertaining and illuminating, hilariously dark, and undeniably hopeful.