Black Cat

Winner of the O2 X Award

'Dynamic'-— Daily Telegraph
'Dazzling'-— Guardian
'Ambitious and virtuoso'-— Financial Times
'Unforgettable'-— The Times
'Ingenious… shimmering'-— New Statesman

On July 21, 1969 two astronauts set foot on the moon; far below, in ravaged Mozambique, a young revolutionary — hailed as the saviour of his country — is murdered by a package bomb.

From these two unconnected events, Simon Ings weaves a great and glittering web that entangles four lives: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a man who sows disaster wherever he treads.

As the twentieth century unravels, Burden, Cogan, Chavez and Jinks are powerless to escape the connections that bind them. This is not fate, but its opposite: the weight of numbers.

On the eve of this thirty-fifth birthday, the unnamed black narrator of Man Gone Down finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days to come up with the money to keep his kids in school and make a down payment on an apartment for them to live in. As we slip between his childhood in inner city Boston and present-day New York City, we discover a life marked by abuse, abandonment, raging alcoholism, and the best and worst intentions of a supposedly integrated America. This is a story of the American Dream gone awry, about what it's like to feel preprogrammed to fail in life and the urge to escape that sentence.