Please chronicles the life of an emotionally numb man who drifts through a hallucinatory world of parties filled with celebrity wannabes, addictive relationships, and jobs that demand he become someone other than who he is. Both a dark satire of the contemporary obsession with the “mediascape” and a sophisticated critique of an increasingly uncaring society that offers fantasy in place of real experience, this first novel by a rising talent paints a compassionate picture of one man’s search for something real to embrace in life.

Please: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Darbyshire, Peter

Literary

Raincoast Books

Trotsky works for a neuromarketing company that scanshis brain to test new products. Only his name isn’t reallyTrotsky -- that’s a code name he’s forced to use at work. Andthe products aren’t real -- they’re just hologram prototypes.Trapped in an increasingly unreal world that leaves him hauntedby hallucinations, Trotsky goes in search of something genuine.Instead, he finds Holiday, a wannabe actress who fakes accidentsfor insurance settlements but who dreams of stardom.She leads him into an underground society of anti-corporateactivists and into a series of dangerous encounters, one ofwhich turns deadly. Discovered by the media, they are dubbedthe Warhol Gang. At first Holiday and Trotsky embrace theirnotoriety and fame, but they’re forced to confront their owndesires and needs -- and differences -- when the Warhol Gangtakes on a life of its own and the body count rises.
The Warhol Gang is a black comedy for anyone who’s everbeen trapped in an endless mall or fantasized about taking revengeon everyone in the office.

The Warhol Gang

HarperCollins, Publishers

Has the World Ended Yet? starts with retired superheroes living in a soulless suburbia where everyone gets lost trying to get home. Then the angels start to fall from the sky. Is it Armageddon? Do we want the world to end? In a series of linked nineteen short stories Peter Darbyshire weaves together superheroes, ghosts, the undead, a hired hitman, the Cold War, the Rapture and avenging angels in a Twilight Zone–style collection that is riveting and human. We follow characters that are identifiable through situations that are unreal, through a technicolour landscape we are all familiar with. The end of the world is not what we expect, what any of Darbyshire’s characters expect and may not really be happening at all. But should it?

Has the World Ended Yet?: Stories

Buckrider Books

The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (The Book of Cross)

Genre Fiction

Poplar Press

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Books by Darbyshire, Peter