The Fox & the Fish

The Fox & The Fish is a wildly inventive comic novel about one man's determined escape from life-and the extraordinary people who refuse to let him get away.

Julius McEarly was once a mathematician. Now he works in a timber yard, drinks when opportunity and finance coincide, and considers himself to be a Fish. He has good reason for abandoning his former life, although explaining it would involve probability, a winning lottery ticket and a mathematical error of potentially infinite proportions. Then he encounters the Fox: Ingvild Benigglety, the fiercely intelligent young daughter of Ireland's most formidable Tinker. She sees through Julius with alarming ease, discovers the flaw in his calculations and introduces mathematics to the previously unsuspected concept of Outfinity. Around them gathers an unforgettable shoal of lovers, frauds, philosophers, Tinkers, coffins and liberated chickens. In their company, the Higgs Boson may be cheese, life may be governed by the Rules of Chess, and the greatest wisdom often belongs to the greatest fool. Absurd, irreverent and unexpectedly tender, The Fox & The Fish is a story of love, friendship and accidental family-and of a man who discovers that it is possible to stop running without surrendering his freedom.

Bill Allerton lives, sleeps, drinks and writes in Sheffield, a place he leaves only occasionally to buy anthologies with short story competitions on the back page. (Which he may or may not remember having entered.) He likes listening to his own voice on the radio and trying to convince ladies that it is safe to ride on the back of his motorbike. To pay the mortgage Bill manages a small building company and, when not lamenting with people over the poor state of their house, likes to write and make love ( in that order). He also has the ability to make a fine guitar sound like 18 feet of string and a yard of Korean ply. Bill is currently writing a collective novel under the working title 'Urban Foxes', which he hopes to complete this year, or next, or next.