Man-Eating Typewriter

By: Richard Milward

Narrated by: Marc Graham, Richard Milward

'We're all in the gutter but some of us are ogling the sparkles.'

Set at the fag-end of the 60s at the moment when Swinging London is starting to take on a darker hue in the wake of Charles Manson's murders, and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy Piccadilly-based publisher of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the great oulipo experiments in fiction.

It is the story of a psychopath called Raymond Novak and his untimely demise told entirely in 'polari' - a language developed and used mainly amongst the metropolitan homosexual community in the time when being gay was still a criminal offence.

From a love affair with a Barbary Ape on the Rock of Gibraltar to erotic cabaret in Paris and unreliable adventures with Madam Ovary, Raymond's mother in the bombed-out ruins of Blitzed London, Man-Eating Typewriter is an act of seductive sedition by a writer with unfathomable literary talent and chutzpah.

Wild, transgressive, erotic, offensive and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making; a book that will be talked about, celebrated and misunderstood for decades.

©2023 Richard Milward (P)2023 Orion Publishing Group Limited

Critic reviews

"A major talent." (Irvine Welsh)

"Remarkable, beautiful, magic. Like Ulysses for those who can't cope with reading Ulysses." (Paolo Hewitt)