A Boy's Guide to Track and Field - Tapa dura

Lem Gulliver (25, maths teacher), can't seem to leave home. His mother (46, courtroom artist) and step-father (49, AA patrol man), make no secret of the fact that he's become a cuckoo in the nest, but since Dawn (27, animal rights activist) left him for a dog trainer, Lem has returned to his natural state of emotional drift. He can't understand how the people around him manage the plot of a grown-up life - careers, mortgages, marriages, homes, friends. With no girlfriend, no place of his own, no ambition and no prospects, the only real direction in his life seem to be the tracks of the Victoria line which take him daily to work. There, the likes of Emily, Nokia, Jason and Kemal stubbornly resist his efforts to make the Fibonacci code fun. One day in June, Lem gets the distinct feeling that he is unravelling; he needs to take control of his life and change it radically before he reaches the end of the line, but who will show him the way? Original, inventive and wry, Sabrina Broadbent's second novel is a vision of uncertainty, the unsaid and the untouched; a place where people lose their bearings and ultimately, a place of realignment. "A Boy's Guide to Track and Field" starts at Walthamstow and travels southbound towards Brixton, and the reader is swept along with Lem in a review of the past, which gradually accelerates into the present.

Sabrina Broadbent's debut novel, Descent, won the WH Smith Raw Talent Award. She lives in London and works part-time as an English teacher. A Boy's Guide to Track and Field is her second novel.