Manning: Independently published

Manning
A novel by Jason Carlisle

Rufus Manning is unemployed, unhinged and slowly coming undone. Trapped in a decaying flat and haunted by bureaucratic absurdities, he spirals into a hallucinatory war with the world around him - a world that resembles Britain, but warped through paranoia, working-class despair, and a soldier's fever dream.

Manning is a darkly comic descent into fractured identity, institutional failure, and the coping fantasies of a man on the brink. Blending literary grit with surreal satire, the novel follows Rufus through trench fantasies, elevator nightmares, paper mâché doppelgängers, and a final flight that may be real - or just another delusion.

Written in a blistering stream-of-consciousness style, Manning is both grotesque and profound - a savage portrait of collapse and resistance, where every Tuesday bleeds into the next.