Bright Shiny Morning, By James Frey

"Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable", reads the epigraph to this novel by James Frey, the author of the controversial memoir A Million Little Pieces, which was revealed to be partly fictional. Bright Shiny Morning is written with a similar urgency of prose as that book, and pays little heed to conventional syntax, thus creating a beguiling momentum of its own, propelled by raw emotion and energy.

The narrative is peopled with a motley assortment of lost souls who drift west to California in hope of being found. There is a young couple living in an eastern town "nowhere anywhere everywhere, a small American town full of alcohol, abuse and religion". There is Old Man Joe, whose hair turns white overnight and who sleeps in a toilet in an alley at the back of a taco stand and waits for Los Angeles to supply him with answers. The bizarreness of their quotidian lives endows a rich imagery and this compulsive novel is testament that good fiction can reveal powerful emotional truths.

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