Conville & Walsh

Gabriel Brockwell, aesthete, poet, philosopher, disaffected twenty-something decadent, is thinking terminal. His philosophical enquiries, the abstractions in which he indulges, and how these relate to a life lived, all point in the same direction. His destination is Wonderland. The nature and style of the journey is all that’s to be decided.

Taking in London, Tokyo, Berlin and the Galapagos Islands, LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND documents Gabriel Brockwell’s remarkable global odyssey. Committed to the pursuit of pleasure and in search of the Bacchanal to obliterate all previous parties, Gabriel’s adventure takes in a spell in rehab, a near-death experience with fugu, a sexual encounter with an octopus, and finally an orgiastic feast in the bowels of Berlin’s majestic Tempelhof Airport. Along the way we see a character disintegrate and re-shape before our eyes.

LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND carries you through its many corridors of delight and horror on the back of Gabriel’s voice, which is at once skeptical, idealistic, broken and optimistic. An allegorical banquet and a sly commentary on these End Times and the march towards insensate banality, DBC Pierre’s third novel completes a loose trilogy of fictions, each of which stands alone as a joyful expression of the human spirit.