Eight-year-old Phillip travels through California with his mother, living in motels and moving between the homes of her temporary lovers.

He narrates this unstable childhood through an eerie mixture of scientific language, metaphysical certainty and possessive devotion. It honestly really gets under your skin. In his world, matter, light, sex and abandonment become parts of one private cosmology. It is a true study of consciousness severed from ordinary moral proportion. Phillip is brilliant, frightening and radically unreliable—capable of turning violence into theory before the reader has fully registered what he has done. 

First published in 1989, Bradfield’s debut became a neglected cult novel and was eventually returned to print in 2013. Its prose is lush, comic and chemically strange, placing the debris of American consumer life beside a child’s grandiose fantasies of purity and control. There are traces of Nabokov and suburban gothic here, but the novel has its own feverish logic. Best for readers drawn to damaged narrators, uncanny childhoods and fiction in which language does not describe delusion so much as manufacture it. 

First Vintage Contemporaries edition, August 1990 paperback. Good condition with cover creasing, rubbing, edge and corner wear, and a long crease to the upper front cover.