Tableaux: Scenes from the Decade of Excess

“Reading Tableaux was like revisiting old haunts, or places I would have liked to have haunted. It sparked visceral sense memories and made me nostalgic. And the ending …” – Midori

It is 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s re-election and the Brighton bomb; one can sense revolution in the air. Oliver Woolf is a thirty-something journalist, well-connected socially, and an instinctual conservative, whose comfortable routine is upset by a chance encounter in the rain. The girl in the rain is Candy, who is not what she first seems. Over the summer, Oliver and Candy form an unlikely friendship, and when she stops calling on him, he sets out to find her. His search leads him through a labyrinthine underworld that extends from London to Manhattan. Along the way, he meets someone who will change his life forever. A late-twentieth century Rake’s Progress, Oliver’s journey confronts issues that are still largely taboo. Illustrated with photographs by Steve Diet Goedde, Tableaux combines art and storytelling in a new hybrid form.

Dominic Jay is a former arts journalist. His professional life gave him privileged access to people and places that are usually off limits. The material for this, his first novel, was collected over many years. Many of the scenes and characters are drawn from life. As he says, 'all writers are voyeurs'.