The Charlatan

Can we ever truly unplug from the webs we spin and surf? Under a suspiciously thin veil of satire, The Charlatan exposes the nerves of authenticity in the digital age, following the dubious exploits of self-styled hustler Jack Valentine across contemporary New York City. A would-be artist and reformed sex-addict, Jack claims to be detaching his soul from the profane, ditching his smartphone and questioning the "current thing" at every turn. But Jack strays from his pursuit of the promised land when he latches on to Penny Delphine - a soulful songbird on her own path towards Catholicism - who embodies the dark reflection of his motives. Caught in the picaresque whirlpool of dirty clubs, a filthier music industry, and an utterly obscene world, Jack and Penny's unpinnable pursuit of each other, and themselves, reveals how past sins can contaminate and overwhelm the present. When a photo of Jack at a monarchist masquerade goes viral, he finds himself crowned the meme-prince of the new reactionary bohemia, torn between counter-cultural stardom and the allure of honest redemption through Penny's heart. As Jack's grip on reality and romance shatters into pieces, readers of The Charlatan are faced with the puzzle of what went wrong, and what might be right. Penned in hallucinogenic prose, with a revolving door of whimsical characters, The Charlatan snowballs into a funhouse-mirror odyssey of masculine fragility and amoral decadence. Entire countries and far-flung subcultures are sucked into the kaleidoscopic spiral of two young Americans trying to give love a chance inside the postmodern matrix, before careening towards a brutal catharsis. Nothing is true and everything is permitted - to a point... but whose point? In an enthralling procession of seductive dialogues and lecherous trains of thought, The Charlatan unleashes the cacophony of a dangerously sardonic, tragicomic antihero for our modern era. Everyone knows the song's beat, but few dare read the lyrics, much less compose their own. Reveling in cringe and poking human decency in the eye, the ribald saga of Jack and Penny is the paean of a generation inching towards existential questions without a compass, but with a desperate passion.