A picaresque 1980s bookshop romance, rife with music and mayhem, by the acclaimed biographer and author of Heatwave.

In the summer of 1982, the year of the Falklands War, Ellen Moore arrives in Camden Town determined to shake off the past. She starts a job at Leviathan Books, where the boss wanders around in Aleister Crowley's old dressing gown and conducts a secret upstairs salon.

Soon she's settled into a rackety new life, living in a local squat with a bunch of post-punks and singing in a synth-pop group with bold ambitions – but will her plans be derailed by a beautiful young junkie, his malevolent older lover and a book with seeming magical properties that's been stolen from her sinister boss at Leviathan?



John L. Williams is a historian, novelist, and biographer from Cardiff. He is the crime fiction reviewer for The Mail on Sunday. He is also the co-founder and literary director of the Laugharne Weekend Festival in west Wales.