UNSPEAKABLE

In his previous life, Joe worked for a clandestine government organization specializing in enhanced interrogation techniques. Torture. But he was one of the good guys. His job was to better prepare someone entering a high-risk situation in a dangerous part of the world, where the torture might be real. But the line between real and pretend blurs when you've been forced into a stress-position, and Joe always feared that it was possible, likely even, that one day someone might come to repay the favor.

Now, recently divorced and reclusive, Joe plots an eccentric course of circles around his garden that will, once he's completed the circuit, equal in distance a trip around the globe. What isn't immediately clear to his curious neighbors, however, is that perhaps Joe isn't walking towards a goal, but rather away from his past.

This genre-bending literary suspense is about dualities: the nightmare of excruciating pain, and the restorative power found in the quiet solitude of a long walk.

Geoff Nicholson's fiction includes Bleeding London (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize), Bedlam Burning (a New York Times Book Review notable books of the year), What We Did On Our Holidays (filmed as Permanent Vacation, starring David Carradine), Footsucker, and among others, The Food Chain. His book length non-fiction includes Day Trips to the Desert, Sex Collectors, and most recently The Lost Art of Walking. Over half of his novels have been optioned for the screen; his books are translated around the world.