Conville & Walsh

Robert Mighall is obsessed with sunshine. Addicted. Known as ‘Gecko Boy’ to his neighbours, who often find him up a ladder, catching the few last rays of the descending sun, he knows where and for how long there will be patches of sunlight after work in the summer, and religiously pursues them in strict order around his home in Bloomsbury.

SUNSHINE tells the story of our relationship with this elusive entity through Robert’s own quest to understand his remote and fickle mistress. Put more simply, it is about the pursuit of happiness. It has that magic of an obsessive writing about his or her obsession, such as Tulip or Waterlog, and celebrates something to which most of us feel a potent primal attraction, but which has strangely eluded serious or sustained attention in print. No one has quite got under the skin of our devotion to this stuff, which hits you with a sense of homecoming when you step onto the tarmac of a foreign airport, or which the cat – who knows nothing of metaphysics or allegory – serenely worships.

Aimed at the market for such titles as James Hamilton-Paterson’s Seven Tenths and Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur, it will question what our relationship with sunshine actually is – what it is exactly that happens chemically, emotionally, associatively, aesthetically and metaphysically when we seek out, and bask in, a patch of that fleeting, fantastical golden light. In pursuing sunshine and its myriad meanings Robert is led into a broader exploration of the great themes: happiness, love, memory, worship, and the quest for fulfillment.