Yorkshire, 1869. When self–made Victorian businessman Isaac Brookes returns home from his wool mill in France he could not have suspected that a chance encounter on a train would alter the gastronomical landscape of the world. But when he meets, and almost kills, Rodrigo Vermilion, a hunchback midget dressed in rags––Vermilion sees in pragmatic Isaac a grand opportunity to improve his lot in life, and becomes determined to go into business with him. Enter the Temperance Soldiers, a band of righteous social moralists who offer Vermilion the inspiration, and idea he so desperately needs. One taste of his first Temperance Ale–worse he felt sure than the ancient slime at the bottom of the pond, old frog juice, and duck droppings scooped up in a glass–and this savvy schemer with a genius for persuasion is off and running and soon convinces Isaac and his son to invest their fortune on an idea sure to appeal to Victorian sensibilities: Rhubarilla©, a fizzy, fruity drink that will sweep the world in ways that even the irrepressible Vermilion could have imagined. A family saga, a fairy tale, a fantastical history of England and of the origins of world's favorite soft drink–INTOXICATED is a witty, and dazzling treat from a writer of boundless imagination and promise.
John Barlow's prize-winning fiction and non-fiction has been published by HarperCollins/William Morrow, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 4th Estate and various others in the UK, US, Australia, Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.
His current project is the LS9 crime series. Set in the north of England, it follows the life of John Ray, the half-Spanish son of crime boss Antonio 'Tony' Ray. The series will eventually comprise nine novels.
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John was born in West Yorkshire, England, in 1967. He worked as a musician before studying English Literature at Cambridge University and language acquisition at Hull University. After teaching English for several years, he moved to Spain to write full-time, and has been there ever since. He is married to Susana, with whom he has two sons. They currently live in the Galician city of A Coruña.
Apart from writing fiction, he also works as a ghost writer and journalist. He has written for the Washington Post, Slate.com, Penthouse, Departures Magazine and The Big Issue, and he is currently a feature writer for the award-winning food magazine Spain Gourmetour.
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John's first published work, a novella, won the Paris Review's prestigious Discovery (Plimpton) Prize in 2002. He went on to publish a collection of novellas, EATING MAMMALS, the novel INTOXICATED, set in the late nineteenth century, and EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL, a food-travelogue about Spain. He then published the off-beat noir novel WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO JERRY PICCO? under the pseudonym Joe Flores, before embarking on the LS9 series, which is scheduled to take him a decade to complete.
John has also worked with the conceptual artists goldin+enneby on their ACÉPHALE project, which has so far taken him to Nassau, Bergamo, Oslo and London, and into the company of Bahamian off-shore bankers, defamation layers, prize-winning artists, and Martina Navratilova. His writing for the project has been published variously in English, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Portuguese, and has featured at numerous art shows/galleries in the UK, the US, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Sweden, Norway and Italy.The novel HEADLESS, based on the project, is scehduled for release in 1212.
