The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven — Alan Warner

Manolo Follano, a 40-year-old Spanish roue, has built a comfortable life for himself in his hometown by the sea. His architectural design company is thriving, his suits are Italian linen, his cigars Cuban, and he's on friendly terms with his two ex-wives and happily frees to enjoy the charms of women much younger. For a playboy like Manolo - handsome, fastidious, opinionated and more than a little vain - to be told by his doctor and friend that he is HIV Positive is, it would seem, the end of everything. In Alan Warner's fifth novel, however, this devastating news is only the beginning. Manolo strolls around his familiar haunts recalling, with Proustian clarity, the loves of his life, as he prepares to tell each of them his terrible secret - all the while bracing himself for the final reckoning, and the thin hope of redemption. In a series of vivid, erotic, hilarious flashbacks, he plays back his life in glowing Technicolor: each wild and glorious set-piece building towards a complete picture of a life - flawed, certainly, but passionate, richly imagined and deeply humane. A novel of stunning visual invention that manages to be both provocative and profound, both shocking and riotously funny, "The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven" is further proof of Alan Warner's prodigal gifts of spirit and imagination, and his position in the first rank of contemporary writers.