Publisher's Synopsis
A disquieting new novel from the award-winning author of The Testimony of Taliesin Jones.
Johnny Yells - young, fit, ambitious advertising executive - finds his father's death peculiarly useful: at the funeral he gets the idea for his first really successful campaign. The Smiling Jesus changes the face of life assurance and brings Johnny acclaim throughout the advertising world. With a promotion, a new car, a new flat in a swanky part of town, he's getting all he ever wanted. So what is it that is making him so obsessed with his own death, so detached from those around him? And is the fact that the Smiling Jesus on the campaign posters seeming to frown at him a sign that he is going mad?
Rhidian Brook won a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Author's Club First Novel Award for The Testimony of Taliesin Jones. Set in contemporary London, in the glamorous, shallow world of advertisng, with a modern Everyman as hero dealing with everyday questions of life, death and What It All Means, his second novel represents a marked leap in ambition. Written in plainer, sparser prose, it has the tenor of a fable or a contemporary parable without delivering the resolution of a moral, ending teasingly and elusively. It's very much a novel about the eighties, written for the nineties, and charged with marketing and publicity potential.
