'Fast, feverish and arresting' George Harrison

Paul lives quietly in a northern town. By day, he works at a café; by night, he channels his anguish into the dark, arresting panels of his graphic novel, burying childhood trauma beneath ink and imagination.

When a chance conversation with a family member shatters this fragile equilibrium, he makes a decision that will change his life: he goes to the police. As rage, doubt and exhaustion threaten to overwhelm him, Paul must decide how far he is willing go in pursuit of the truth.

Ray Robinson charts one man's journey from silence to reckoning, in a powerful story of art, memory and the cost of justice.



Ray Robinson was b orn in North Yorkshire. His debut novel, Electricity, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award; its screen adaptation won Best Screenplay at the National Film Awards. His other novels include Forgetting Zoë, winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, and The Mating Habits of Stags, which was shortlisted for the Portico Prize and adapted from his Bafta-nominated short film Edith.



'A fast, feverish and arresting novel. Intensely visual, and brought to life by surprising and effective turns of phrase, Ray Robinson's work is all the more disturbing for its focus on quiet horrors: those hidden behind closed doors and locked away in the anterooms of memory'



'A haunting, brutally honest tour de force. This absorbing novel is a masterclass in the persistence of memory, proving that trauma never truly leaves – it simmers beneath the surface. Ray Robinson brilliantly captures the mind's creative architecture for facing the unfaceable, stripping away the binary of abuse to reveal a multifaceted spectrum of colour. A stunning testament to the brilliance of the human spirit'



'You'd be hard pushed to find a book that better describes the life of a survivor. Other people's actions against us may be fleeting, but the ramifications last a lifetime. This is a harrowing and yet beautiful story of one man living with those ramifications the best he can'



'A devastating novel with truth at its heart, both in subject and voice. The unravelling facts of a historic abuse have been rendered with unusual lyricism and artfulness. Through Paul it feels as if we are peeling back the skin of adulthood to reveal an addled child beneath'