It is a sweltering August in Aberystwyth: the bandstand melts, the Pier droops, and Sospan the ice-cream seller experiments with some dangerously avant-garde new flavours. A man wearing a Soviet museum curator's uniform walks into Louie Knight's office and spins a wild and impossible tale of love, death, madness and betrayal. Sure, Louie had heard about Hughesovka, the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century Czar. But he hadn't believed that it really existed until he met Uncle Vanya. Now the old man's story catapults him into the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom in search of a girl who mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago. His life imperilled by snuff philatelists and a renegade spinning wheel salesman, Louie finds his fate depending on two most unlikely talismans - a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russian cosmonaut's sock.

Accolades

Shortlisted for Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2010.

Author Biography

Malcolm Pryce was born in the UK and has lived and worked abroad since the nineties. He has held down a number of jobs including BMW assembly-line worker, hotel washer-up and aluminium salesman. He is the author of Aberystwyth Mon Amour, Last Tango in Aberystwyth, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth and Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth.