Twenty Eight Worlds — Gary Allen

Twenty-Eight Worlds is about a middle-aged, dying writer living in Italy who goes in search across Europe for the Eastern European girl he walked out on many years before. The novel deals with European culture, history, art, religion, as told though the writer, but is also about the underclass of Europe, the corruption, sex industry, and immigration, those who have slipped under the net. It also tells the story of Sela—the girl he walked out on, leaving her in their cheap bedsit in Amsterdam, when he began to get published—who was left abandoned in an Eastern European country, brought-up by her superstitious grandmother, then left orphaned, sexually exploited, smuggled across borders to Western Europe, where she worked as a prostitute before meeting the writer. The novel also deals with the writer's childhood, growing-up during the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland, and his own escape. The book is (quite naturally, given the subject material) sexually explicit, but also full of black humour. At the end of the novel, he never finds Sela, but never really expected to, and the journey was more a search for himself, a penance for his life.