Rainbows and Lollipops

Fate boots in your door at stupid o'clock, raids your fridge and drinks straight from the milk carton.

Jake Taylor knows, because that's the night the police rang.

Jake, 42, has just lost Tom, his partner of six years, on the M5. They never married. Jake's name isn't on the flat, the hospital won't let him past reception, and Tom's sister Rona has decided whose fault it was. By the end of the week he's back in his childhood bedroom under the Star Wars curtains, watching his dad forget his name.

Then a silent retreat in the Clent Hills goes spectacularly wrong, and Jake meets Vicky: senior partner, Brixton to Birmingham, trans, and currently receiving anonymous notes about her "pretty little nose". Vicky's biggest client is TV Scambuster Gerald Penrose, whose daughter is marrying a Canadian she met at Niagara Falls eleven months ago, and whose wedding is being planned by people who serve six-month-old molecular cake.

Between a stand-up course run by a tyrant, a pink stretch limo to a funeral they've been banned from, and a shell company with Rona's fingerprints all over it, Jake and his new friends set about getting Tom's name back. And Jake's.

Warm, filthy and furious in equal measure, Rainbows and Lollipops is a novel about the family you lose, the one you build, and a city that knows how to laugh at a wake.

For readers of Matt Cain, Mike Gayle and Richard Roper.