Wild Life

Longlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize 2016

When we moved into the wild, the wild moved into us.

When a troubled advertising salesman loses his job, the fragile wall between his public and private personas comes tumbling down. Fleeing his debtors, Adam abandons his family and takes to sleeping rough in a local park, where a fraternity of homeless men befriend him.

As the months pass, Adam gradually learns to appreciate the tough new regime, until winter arrives early, threatening to turn his paradise into a nightmare.

Starving, exhausted and sick of the constant infighting, Adam decides to return to his family. The men, however, have other plans for him. With time running out, and the stakes raised unbearably high, Adam is forced to question whether any of us can truly escape the wildness within.

Liam Brown brings us another enthralling survival tale which questions human belonging in either nature or society. Adam gambles with his life in this Lord of the Flies style struggle as he tries to escape back to modern society, with his sanity intact.

'An inventive, finely written and disturbing portrait of 21st century park life, a world where the urban and the feral are bound to clash but are also destined to unearth a fragile, tender optimism.' Jim Grace

'Viscerally propulsive. I read Liam Brown's new novel the way I might have once gone on a three-day bender. Wild Life is as intoxicating as home-distilled hooch.' Stephen May

'A deliciously visceral undercurrent of violence ... this compulsive read demands to be devoured in one sitting.' Kerry Hadley-Price

'With shades of Ballard, Lord of the Flies and Bear Grylls … dark, brutal, funny and unforgettable.' Benjamin Myers