大象传媒

The first adult novel by Meg Rosoff, author of the bestselling Young Adult novel "How I Live Now".

Jonathan Trefoil has arrived in New York from college and is ready for his life to begin. He's found himself an apartment and he's temporarily in charge of his brother's dogs (Dante, a Border Collie, and Sissy, a Spaniel) while his brother is working in Dubai. His best friend Max gets him a job at Comrade, a marketing company run by one of their school friends. He has a smart girlfriend, Julie, who will join him once she's found work. Life seems good.

But it isn't really, he's lost; a dreamer floundering. His creativity is stifled by the mind-numbing work at Comrade: thinking up pithy ways to sell a budget office supplies company's wares, which they always reject in favour of tried and tested slogans "Pens: 3 for 2". He holds onto his sanity by writing a graphic novel "The New York Inferno" in which a Border Collie spirit guide accompanies a young poet through the nine circles of the New York underworld.

Things gradually come to a head when Julie secures a job in her company's New York office and the different, unhappy strands of Jonathan's life begin to slowly unravel.

Read by Rhashan Stone.

Written by Meg Rosoff.

Abridged by David Jackson Young.