Antony Dobson has lived through a lot in his short twenty-six years. Desperate, loveable and utterly confused, he gets a kick out of taking risks, gets a thrill from taking himself right to the edge and, so far at least, back again. But haunted by childhood memories and guarding a dark, humiliating secret that he dare not reveal, he’s hurtling fast towards the point of no return.
Impressive and irresistibly readable, this tight-rope-walk of a novel explores memory, love, identity, and absence in a dazzling display that is in turn sad, witty and deeply affecting.
Praise for The Man Without:
‘Robinson pitches the reader straight into the thick of it, getting to the source of the damage in vivid, unforgettable fragments’ – The Times
‘Combines beautifully assembled prose with a sharp insight into a very real subject. A disturbing, but worthwhile read’ – Gay Times
‘The Man Without‘s short chapters and snatched paragraphs are evocative of the way in which we remember our lives, not as a single narrative, but as series of events of whose chronology we can’t always be sure… Robinson confronts us with lives blighted by tortured childhoods, but never drifts into the pornography of suffering. His characters may initially believe the key to their adult difficulties lies in the bits they can’t quite remember, but by relating The Man Without to his first novel Robinson demonstrates the non-existence of single truths… However hazy the details, [the characters] know they were involved in a catastrophe. And slowly they come to realise that the way to recovery isn’t behind them, it lies ahead’ – Louise Welsh, the Guardian