Abandoned by his mother, neglected and abused, especially by his awful cousin Agnes, life will never be the same again for the ultra-imaginative, young Billy Sikes when his mysterious half-brother Herbert suddenly arrives into it and Agnes disappears. Set in Ireland in the 1970s, Billy tells his extraordinary story, first as a child, and then as a, seemingly, delinquent teenager, to a background noise of the preaching of the Catholic Church, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the war in Vietnam, the warbling of popular music and the wisdom of his revered, older, cousin Anna.

Dublin in the 1970s ... as you might never have imagined it! Life and death, heaven and hell and everything in between. Gangs of marauding skinheads, persecuted dwarfs, put-upon amateur dramatists and discommoded vagrants, vengeful rats, mythical icons and fictional heroes, all surfacing in a river of consciousness that James Joyce, himself, could have been proud of.