A beetle shows up in a motel room in New York, and then we are led through 1930s London and a present-day thread, stitching together bodybuilding, fascism, eugenics, and a kind of obsessive, slightly deranged idea of the “perfect body.”

There’s a Nazi sympathiser obsessed with physical culture, a Jewish boxer caught in the machinery of it, and then—cut sideways—a contemporary narrative involving experimental drugs and a man whose body is no longer entirely his own.

Beauman writes like he doesn’t trust the ground he’s on. It’s fast, funny in a very dry, off-angle way, and constantly shifting tone—historical novel one minute, body-horror-adjacent satire the next. We have ideology, flesh, and performance all blurring together. It shouldn't work, but it most certainly does. 

Sceptre paperback, 2010 (first trade edition). Very good condition. Clean pages, light general wear.