England Before the Rain

For some of us, childhood is only a nightmare away. When Stephen Connolly, a self-taught artist, drops out of Cambridge University to paint in the slums of 1970s and 1980s Liverpool, it soon gets much closer than that. He struggles against both anti-Semitism and his brutal Jewish mother, against merciless poverty and corrupting affluence. He is pulled apart by two passions, for bed-mate and for soul-mate. The prostitute Anna teaches him urban survival and the petite lecturer Jenny clings to him like a mad mollusc to an unstable rock.

The city is in turmoil from mass unemployment and riots. But the greatest threats to Stephen’s sanity are the monsters and imaginary playmates that emerge from the fog of his solitary, haunted childhood.

Rough, sinister, bohemian, the story battles its way to a happy ending through tragedy, grim humour and the bastard miracle of love. Try this for something scarier and more hard-edged than the average historical romance.

Adam Wilderness wrote his first published novel, England Before the Rain, to exorcise personal demons, though it is not an autobiography, to mourn the death of the old working class, and to explore the strange afterlife of childhood’s imaginary playmates. It is an unusual love story set mainly in the Liverpool and Cambridge of his youth, but Adam has gone easy on the gritty social realism in favour of dark humour with some psychoanalytic undercurrents.

Adam is a self-taught author of offbeat fiction. As a young man he often lived in student lodgings, squats and condemned properties around England. He has both dined and cooked at some of the most exclusive soup kitchens. His work draws on long experience of the twilight world inhabited by haunted artists, baffled lovers and those who cannot get over life’s little joke.

Search ’Adam Wilderness’ on Amazon for a complete list of this author’s e-books and print editions. He wishes you success with your own life’s work, whatever it may be. A pilgrimage of a thousand miles begins beneath your very feet.