Loren Ipsum

Writers are being murdered. Heads are rolling; ponytails are chopped off; victims tarred and feathered. The French literary world lives in fear of the next attack. A nihilistic terrorist group takes responsibility, but their objective remains obscure. Loren Ipsum is an English journalist, who moves to Paris to research a monograph on an underground writer called Adam Wandle. The terrorists’ slogans are all culled from his works. Has Adam been co-opted as their guru, or is he actually their éminence grise? And what of Loren Ipsum herself? Will they ever be able to leave the 21st century and make it to the mythical Blue Island? Set on the Riviera and in Paris, Loren Ipsum is a darkly comic satirical novel. A famous author is expropriated from her beautiful garden, which is turned into a commune. The severed head of a British author residing in Paris is discovered in a box. A Scandinavian playwright’s ponytail is cut off on the streets of the Left Bank. A mermaid blows up a yacht on which a sparkling literary party is in full swing... ‘Dazzlingly comic and profoundly serious, Loren Ipsum writes, rewrites and unwrites the great Anglo-French novel’ – C.D. Rose, author of We Live Here Now ‘In Loren Ipsum language itself is up in arms. Gallix’s gleeful opus of literary insurrection is a rogue assemblage of styles and strategies that bristles with cunning stunts, skilful swordplay, and meta-tricksy in-your-endos’ – Rob Doyle, author of Threshold