From the author of the Man Booker shortlisted The Quickening Maze, a brilliant, touching and funny story about an extraordinary friendship.

'A novel bursting with incident, humour, humanity and literary promise' Sunday Times

Saul Dawson-Smith is ten years old. He can memorise the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards in under a minute and is in training for the World Memory Championships. Howard McNamee is twenty-eight: lonely, overweight, poorly educated, and on the run from his memories of a murky Glaswegian childhood.

As Howard navigates a bewildering new life in London - including accidentally acquiring a Russian fiancée - he is taken under the wing of Saul's parents, and forms an unlikely friendship with the solitary boy. But as pressure mounts before the Championship, Howard realises he must act to save his small friend from a life of unbearable expectation. And so, he and Saul head out on the strangest road trip of all time - one that will turn both their lives upside down.

Adam Foulds was born in 1974 and lives in South London. He read English at St. Catherine's, Oxford, has a Creative Writing MA from UEA and received the Harper-Wood fellowship from St. John's College, Cambridge. His poetry, praised by Christopher Reid and Craig Raine, has appeared in magazines such as Arete, Stand and Quadrant. He is the author of The Truth About These Strange Times which won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.