Mameluke Bath

"The writing is beautiful and the characterisation tender, funny and satisfyingly voyeuristic."—Hannah Eaton, author of Naming Monsters Mameluke Bath is the bizarre story of Christie Smithkin, a 39-year-old misfit, misanthrope and virgin, who lives in the nightmarish English city of St Pauly. Friendless, paranoid, and lacking the funds she needs for the completion of her PhD thesis, mixed-race Christie’s only hope lies in a new ‘asylum-seeker mentoring’ scheme for which she has recently volunteered as a mentor. Offering guidance to recently-arrived African refugees fleeing torture will, she prays, provide her with a sense of social purpose and perhaps even emotional connection. Christie’s plan goes awry when she discovers that Mukelenge, her Congolese mentee, has already been assigned a mentor: Damon, a cheerful, vapid, white male nurse. Worse still, Mukelenge is settling into urban East Midlands society with unnerving confidence and poise. Piqued by the immigrant’s miraculous feats of integration, Christie becomes uncontrollably jealous when she realises that Mukelenge is also casting a spell of seduction over the handsome, doll-like Damon. Christie’s determination to solve the mystery of Mukelenge’s identity, to rescue Damon from the real or imagined horrors of a zombie-factory deep in the woods, and to come to terms with her own terrifying childhood, will hurtle all three protagonists towards a macabre conclusion in the nearby spa town of Mameluke Bath.