Muscle

LONGLISTED FOR THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL FIRST BOOK AWARD In a hard-boiled city of crooks, grifts and rackets lurk a pair of toughs: Box and _____. They're the kind of men capable of extracting apologies and reparations, of teaching you a chilling lesson. They seldom think twice, and ask very few questions. Until one night over the poker table, they encounter a pulp writer with wild ideas and an unscrupulous private detective, leading them into what is either a classic mystery, a senseless maze of corpses, or an inextricable fever dream . . . Drunk on cinematic and literary influence, Muscle is a slice of noir fiction in collapse, a ceaselessly imaginative story of violence, boredom and madness.

Alan Trotter is a writer based in Edinburgh. Muscle, his debut novel, was awarded the inaugural Sceptre Prize for a novel-in-progress.His short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, Under the Influence, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and elsewhere. In 2016 he collaborated with Editions at Play on the experimental digital story All This Rotting ('mesmerising' - Big Issue, 'nauseating' - Irish Times). He has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow - his dissertation concerned writers making unusual use of the form of the book. alantrotter.com