"Trigell's first novel, Boy A...won prizes in Britain, and was acclaimed for its attack on tabloid justice. His second, Cham (short for Chamonix) features a ski bum hero and perhaps aims to replicate for skiing what Kem Nunn has done for surfing. 'Itchy knows, not just from photographs, but by memories of his treatment that he was a beautiful boy, way back when Snickers were Marathons and Michael Jackson was black,' writes Trigell, making humor from the age-old mystery that the same candy bars have different names in the U.S. and England. There's wit here, and a serial rapist, and a noir plot that does get going."--Los Angeles Times
“Trigell’s ski-bum hedonism does for extreme winter sports what Alex Garland’s The Beach did for backpacking.”—Financial Times
“The walking, stalking spirit of Chamonix: forever chasing the beautiful adrenaline rush, but also driven by a dark force.”—Guardian
Long-dead Lord Byron started it, the rock star of his age. But he was a poet who has about as much relevance to modern life as he has to the practice of sliding down snowy slopes on planks of wood. And yet, it was thanks to Byron that Itchy ended up living in Chamonix Mont Blanc, the death-sport capital of the world, among the high mountains and low morals.
Itchy has tried hard with alcohol and adrenaline to numb a past he can’t atone for. Now a serial rapist is stalking Cham’s tourist-thronged streets, haunting the same shadows as Itchy and triggering an obsession that will lead him far from Europe’s peaks, to the depths of the valley and himself.
Jonathan Trigell’s first novel, Boy A, won the Waverton Good Read Award for best first novel of 2004; the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for best book in the Commonwealth by an author under the age of thirty-five; and was voted the World Book Day 'Book to Talk About' 2008. Boy A is now a major feature film starring Andrew Garfield and Peter Mullan, distributed by the Weinstein Company. Trigell lives in Chamonix, France.
