Touching the Starfish

Ashley Stokes’s comic masterpiece stars Nathan Flack, a writer exiled in a backwater and teaching creative writing to a group of high-maintenance cranks and fantasists. When a very literary ghost by the name of James O'Mailer starts to haunt Flack, he has to ask himself: is he sinking into a nether world of delusion, or is he actually O'Mailer's instrument?


This is a brilliantly inventive and hilarious novel in which, true to life, a Chosen One has great responsibility forced upon him, an age-old institutional conspiracy underpins Western Civilization and, crucially, an apocalyptic medieval battle decides all at the climax.