"Though it is only eight o'clock in the morning, he already knows there is a good chance he will have killed himself before the afternoon is out." The man at the pitiless heart of this story is without any redeeming quality; so feature-less he doesn't even warrant a name and yet from the beginning there's something about him, a faint, indiscernible incongruity which ignites the curiosity. By the end, you will realise there are many ways to dissect the life of a human being, the danger is, the truth might be very different from that which you think you know. Playing the games his mother devised, he learned that the inevitable is not always predictable. Yet, after cheating death in the bloodiest of all wars, he gambles his own life in one final challenge. To win and live or to lose and die depends upon the whimsical desires of a beautiful, voluptuous young woman. Swell is compelling and provocative; a story of sweltering desire, deception and manipulation, twisted love and the dispassionate hand of fate. It's a tale for the 21st Century yet the prose imparts the sense of a grainy black and white movie, a Romance Noir, with its stark imagery and poignant drama drenched with connotation. KDP If you like these authors, you will probably like Swell: Vladimir Nabokov Ian McEwan Haruki Murakami Hilary Mantel Mikhail Bulgakov Iain Banks Ted Hughes Nadine Gordimer