The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven [Paperback]

"A savage, surreal and very original imagination."
-"Sunday Telegraph"

‘Funny, profound, shocking and provocative’

"episodes are finely written and read truly"

"... funny, moving, swollen with lust and high anxities, sombre in moments, momentously memorable in passages of lyrical intensity..."

"Warner displays enormous artistry."

‘contains beautiful writing…moments of superb deadpan comedy’.

"...it is very entertaining, but to be surprised, disgusted, challenged: reminded of our reasons for reading novels at all"

"Alan Warner tackles an egoist coming to terms with HIV with typical black humour."

there is wonderful writing here…

'Searing...A vivid portrait of wrestling with an imperfect life in the face of an ordinary death…Very much worth the wait.’

Manolo Follano, a 40-year-old Spanish roue, has built a comfortable life for himself in his hometown by the sea. His architectural design company is thriving, his suits are Italian linen, his cigars Cuban, he's on friendly terms with his two ex-wives and happily free to enjoy the charms of women much younger. For a playboy like Manolo - handsome, fastidious, opinionated and more than a little vain - to be told by his doctor and friend that he is HIV Positive is, it would seem, the end of everything. In Alan Warner's fifth novel, however, this devastating news is only the beginning. Manolo strolls around his familiar haunts recalling, with Proustian clarity, the loves of his life, as he prepares to tell each of them his terrible secret - all the while bracing himself for the final reckoning, and the thin hope of redemption. In a series of vivid, erotic, hilarious flashbacks, he plays back his life in glowing technicolor with each wild and glorious set-piece building towards a complete picture of a life - flawed, certainly, but passionate, richly imagined and deeply humane. A novel of stunning visual invention that manages to be both provocative and profound, both shocking and riotously funny, "The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven" is further proof of Alan Warner's prodigal gifts of spirit and imagination, and his position in the first rank of contemporary writers.

'A savage, surreal and very original imagination.' Sunday Telegraph

Alan Warner is the author of four previous novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos and The Man Who Walks. In 2003 he was chosen as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.