The Vagabond's Breakfast - Softcover

Best book I have read so far this year. On a par with Hilary Mantel or Joan Didion. Utterly terrifying, funny, thought provoking and seemingly without an ounce of self-pity. A masterpiece. --Scott Pack

An enthralling memoir of a young man going deeply and terribly astray. --Tessa Hadley in the London Review of Books.

A jagged tale gracefully told. Full of humane surreality, there s something whole, even holistic, about the brokenness of the life it pieces (back) together. --Patrick McGuinness in the TLS

Richard Gwyn is a novelist, poet and critic. A brief incarnation as a beat poet in the late Seventies culminated in an appearance as a support act to The Cure. He also worked as an inadvertently fraudulent milkman and (legitimate) sawyer in London until an industrial accident led to voluntary exile from Thatcherism and nine years of vagrancy in the Mediterranean. His publications include The Colour of a Dog Running Away, published in the UK, USA and in many translations, and Deep Hanging Out, both novels; two academic titles on illness, the body, and communication, and several poetry titles, the most recent being Sad Giraffe Cafe. He is Director of the MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing at Cardiff University, and lives in the city with his wife and two daughters.