Clue to the Exit

Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter, ex-husband and absent father, has been given six months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel - about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling.

His novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters (familiar to readers of St Aubyn's earlier work) who are locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As this train gets stuck at Didcot, and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous Angelique, A Clue to the Exit comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty and thoughtful, Edward St Aubyn's dazzling novel probes the very heart of being.

'Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation' Alan Hollinghurst

Edward St Aubyn was born in London in 1960. He is also the author of On the Edge, which was shortlisted for the 1998 Guardian Fiction Award; the highly acclaimed trilogy Some Hope, reissued by Picador in 2006; and of Mother's Milk, which was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and won the South Bank Literature Award.

'St Aubyn's attention to detail and comic dialogue make this a must-read' The Times Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter, ex-husband and absent father, has been given six months to live. As he heads for the south of France, he resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel - about consciousness. In the casino, he meets his muse.Ricocheting helplessly from writing to passion to isolation in the desert, Charlie attempts to achieve some measure of understanding before he dies. And as his remaining days diminish along with his stash of gambling chips, his search for 'the flash of freedom at the heart of things' reveals a man ever more witty, thoughtful, and mordantly surprising.'Striking metaphors and resonant evocations of sea and desert . . . accomplished reflections on the possibility of selfhood and the insolubility of consciousness' Sunday Times 'Playful and lingeringly witty . . . Tantalizing' Evening Standard

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