ODIUM

by Peter Burnett

A man asleep, Rubio is a doctor who flees Paris for the Egyptian desert. He escapes his back-biting colleagues, the proximity of his ex-wife, and the depressions that he diagnoses daily in his medical surgery.

And Paris hates Rubio too ...

The city is like a TV show that wants only to humiliate him, to grab the old fellow's neck and force him to shop.

The city is after him and Rubio is running for his life, running down a slope while memory rides behind, ever so gently applying the brakes.

Existentialist and full of sharp observation of Western values, Odium by Peter Burnett may be about depression, but it is a depression of a most scenic kind.

Review of Odium in The Scottish Review of Books

 "A gloriously misanthropic and bilious treatise on the decadent, immoral and inane nature of western European life."

Independent on Sunday

 

"This is breathtaking stuff."

Scotland on Sunday