Sam Tallent Running the Light

'THE BEST NOVEL I'VE EVER READ ABOUT COMEDY' Megan Nolan 'GLORIOUSLY DEPRAVED' Geoff Dyer 'LIT UP MY PLEASURE CENTRES AND LEFT ME STUNNED' Rob Doyle ' Billy Ray Schafer stepped off the plane in Amarillo, Texas, with twenty-six hundred dollars tucked down the leg of his black ostrich-skin cowboy boot. He walked to baggage claim slowly, jelly-legged and nearing lucidity, coming out from under the Xanax he snorted before the flight... ' Debauched, divorced and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days, he travels from hell gig to hell gig across the American Southwest in search of a reason to keep living. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray is the answer to a tragic question: What happens when opportunity never arrives? Or - worse - when it comes and goes? ' Exceptional . . . Running the Light is Dante as gag artist, trapped in a Diabolical Comedy. Or maybe, in the end, a disgraced Odysseus searching for a way back home to contrition and forgiveness. Read it and weep' IRISH TIMES 'Nothing I've read hits the psycho-chemical abyss of road life turned horribly wrong quite like this' LIAS SAOUDI