The Amateur

""One arrives like spittle landing: an emptiness that clings.""

Say you weren't of this world but wanted to be...what would you give, how would you know you'd arrived?

Lily is an outsider who'll do anything to get in...Francis Steerlock, a middle-aged drifter with a ready smile, hides a hopeless obsession...Sonia, a young hitch-hiker, challenges Francis in an elaborate game of hide-and-seek... elderly Mrs. Stoppit, riven by loneliness, develops an ominous condition...Queenie's pre-adolescent fascination with the elusive Sonia leads her-and her little brother Tick-across the safe borders of childhood.

When these half-dozen strangers, with best intentions, take an unexpected route to the worst that can happen, cross-currents of truth and desire, body and soul, obligation and ignorance, self and other, demand a reckoning. Startling and luminous, cut with metaphysical wit, the Amateur tracks this expedition into the gist of what it may cost-for better and worse-to be human.

""Fluh-dump, goes the heart. Fluh-dump. It's not as simple as it looks.""