Venus as a Boy

In a room in Soho, a man is turning gold. His flesh, his organs, even his beautiful eyes, are being transformed by some shocking human alchemy into precious deadly metal. And the path to this curious and frightening predicament has itself been filled with incredible moments. It began on South Ronaldsay amongst the singing seals and ancient ruins of Orkney. There a lad grew up with a rare gift for loving - something that proved much trickier than it sounds. He encountered misunderstanding, bullying, loss and heartbreak. And yet the physical heights he reached - and to which he brought others - went far beyond any normal sensual pleasure. This led to the sort of sex that made people see angels. Indeed when the lad actually lost his virginity, it was to a glorious Dane called Engel who fell - literally - out of the sky, entangled in a huge kite tail. Luke Sutherland's modern-day myth about the power of love veers from stratosphere to gutter, from visions of Heaven to the all-too mortal yearning below for even just one glimpse of it. Short-listed for the 1999 Whitbread Prize for his first novel, Jelly Roll, Sutherland has already hit a literary and emotional nerve with readers, who can only be captivated by this strange and wonderful creation.