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Outstanding first novel from a new voice in British fiction – a Lolita for our times.

Meadowlark is a lonely man. He pins portraits of the Prime Minister and the Queen to his apartment wall. Sent to work in the Tokyo office, he soon becomes lost and ill at ease in the world of besuited Englishmen who, slaves to the office by day, cruise the neonlit nightspots by night with their dispensable cash, fuelled by alcohol and the prospect of casual sex. It isn’t long before Meadowlark undergoes an eerie change that shocks his colleagues: he falls in love with a fourteen year old Japanese girl.

Gavin Kramer’s first novel is the story of this relationship: a portrait of an obsession, a doomed love affair, an Englishman abroad and out of place, bemused and confused and ultimately beaten by an alien culture.

Gavin Kramer was born in 1961 in North London, where he still lives. He read Law and Politics at Cambridge University and now practises as a lawyer in central London. His short stories have appeared in Best Short Stories, Panurge, and most recently in Faber First Fictions. This is his first novel.