Wade O'Leary, aka Fadder, is an artist painting in self-imposed exile in Oslo. He loves carousing in bars, barmaids, and women. As a restless bachelor with no distinct career plan, his nights are spent sedulously trawling through a sordid apothecary of murky sexual waters. 'As Fadder dug in for the long haul, admiring the female form from above, he could not help but notice a tattoo staring back like a cat's eye on the supple shoulder of the road to GO. He tried to focus, gripped on harder, staring at the paint on the walls that lay directly ahead of him in the hope of a sustained stamina-based state of beige transcendentalism, and drove like a demon on the berm of slickened tarmac, hub caps flying off through the bedsheets until they were running on fumes; she was out of ass-gas, and the steering wheel could swerve no more with accurate purpose.' At the Deli Hughes writes with vivid candour and zeal about city life and the pursuit of happiness. This rich and rum collection of short stories and vignettes is full of hilarious and sad encounters with a menagerie of women who seem to have just as hard a time finding love as its protagonist. The writing is comically savvy, bittersweet, and brings the mysteries of the Scandinavian female psyche screaming to life. 'Moments later, she climbed over him and they both lay there on their backs amid the amber light of the bedroom lamp. It looked like they were floating above a large tunnel of viscous lava, the tunnel stretching for miles below them, deep into a volcano and somewhere in its vast labyrinth of channels were their molten pasts.' Scar
