I Hate Martin Amis et al.

'Dark and troubling, distressingly funny. It is one of the best debut novels I've read. Peter Barry is a massive talent. Exciting, original and dangerous.' - Wayne Macauley, author of Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe. It is 1995. Milan Zorec, an aspiring yet rejected novelist, travels from England to Bosnia to join the Serbian forces as a sniper in Sarajevo, in the final months of the longest siege in history. He s determined to find a story that no publisher will be able to damn with the words, I feel I ve seen this before. In doing so Milan journeys from innocence into the slow burning grip of darkness. Among his fellow snipers, the lost souls who make up Ratko Mladic s army, Milan gains the ammunition to write his masterpiece the novel that hasn t been written before. Alternating between London and Sarajevo, I Hate Martin Amis et al is a chilling, blackly humorous novel that will appeal to both lovers of the word and anyone who s fallen short of their ambitions. Peter Barry s stunningly original, award winning debut isn t just about literary failure, though. It s a compelling portrait of the dreamer, and bores down into the very centre of things why we write, why we read, how we might live in these, the strangest of times.