A darkly enchanting tale set in Seattle in the 1990s -- the fictional life of Kurt Cobain's childhood imaginary friend...'Sometime on or before the afternoon of April 5, 1994, Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, barricaded himself in the room above the garage of his Seattle home by propping a stool against the door, and killed himself with a single shot to the head. He wrote a one-page note in red ink, addressing it to "Boddah", his childhood imaginary friend...' (taken from a Cobain web 'shrine')It is a rainy day in Aberdeen, a small logging town near Seattle, sometime in the early 1990s. Homer 'Boda' Alienson, a loner who earns his living by selling by mail order the enormous quantity of toys he collected in his childhood, is suddenly struck by a question which seems to come from nowhere: 'What about love?' Homer has always lived a life apart. He would far rather go on spending his days as he usually does: avoiding his customers' correspondence, watching Twin Peaks, and strolling through woods that smell of rain. But the question becomes insistent, and avoiding it becomes impossible. But how does one go about having a love affair? Homer doesn't even know how to begin. What's more, ever since childhood he has been convinced that the entire population of Aberdeen, including his mother, is possessed by bodysnatchers that are human only in appearance, 'different' beings from which he tried to protect himself by never going to sleep for twenty years: that is, until the day he meets a boy called Kurt loafing about under the bridges. It is Kurt who reveals to him the 'way' to sleep: heroin, nirvana. Now Homer is hooked on drugs, but he still has the strength to search for love; and in the wide open spaces of America he will find a love that suits him, an other-worldly love, fit for a boy who has always felt himself to be somehow alien to the world around him...

Author Biography

Tommaso Pincio is the author of two other novels (unpublished in English), M, and Lo spazio sfinito. Having spent many years in America, he now lives in his native Rome.