Dark and idiosyncratic, this avant-garde novel is a madcap read. In surreal, polyphonic prose Quin follows Alistair Berg’s stay in a seaside town and his increasingly farcical attempts to kill his father. Berg/Greb is a grotesque anti-hero, a self-mythologizing, hallucinating ‘hair-restorer’ obsessed with his mother whose voice ‘is a wooden spoon stirring the mixed murmurings in his head.’ Quin vividly evokes the seedy, tawdry world of post war Brighton from Berg’s off-kilter (and often intoxicated) point of view: ‘Cafe lights tinselled round the windows, inside red bulbs were hearts cut out against a perspiring ceiling – a whale’s stomach about to expand, appeared to tremble as Berg entered.’ Quin’s imagery is luminous throughout, ranging from the eerily beautiful, he ‘followed the four-headed global lights of buses that trailed like heavy robes through the streets’, to the acid-drenched: ‘The leaves were sun-baked lizards stirring towards the sea that churned its chains of silver snakes’. Savage, absurd and theatrical, ‘Berg’ is a startlingly original novel.