DISPLACED PEOPLE                      A Novel by Charles Davis

The news from paradise is not good.

The insiders want to cover it in concrete, the outsiders want to profit from it, the migrants just want to get through it as best they can, and the xenophobes want to stomp all over it and anyone who gets in their way. In the meantime, Tom’s got a houseful of whores he can’t afford to feed, a dog that won’t stop fornicating, a girlfriend who already has, and a nagging vision of perfection that simply won’t leave him alone.

Is there any way of living together in Eden, el espectáculo mas fuerte de la Costa del Sol? Is there an answer to the eternal conundrum of is you is or is you ain’t my baby? Can the spiralling chaos be resolved before the neighbour acts on his threat to cut Tom’s head off? What are the police going to think when they find a bachelor with a little arab boy hidden away in his mountain retreat? And what are we to make of ‘a madwoman of pleasure sucked with a wise language’?

These are just some of the questions that have to be answered if the displaced people of Andalusia are to find themselves and, incidentally, one another, but the solutions are not easy, not least because nobody is entirely sure whether paradise is going to play itself out as tragedy or farce.

Displaced People is a comic novel recounting the interlinking stories of clandestine migrants and european expatriates in Southern Spain. The book explores the accommodation of various versions of idealism to reality, the morality of contemporary immigration policies, the reductive nature of any attempt, pictorial or verbal, to reproduce what goes on when you’ve got two bare bodies in a bed, the clash of cultures in modern day Europe, and the way that disparate, sometimes disagreeable people can come together in common cause.

The novel has yet to find a home. To read the first 20 pages, click here.