SORY - some things are better left in the oven (paperback)

Every week, five fading demons

take a sauna in a Hackney pizza oven.

Wang feeds them heat and cheap

Beijing liquor. He makes terrible pizza.

And on the back burner, a black elixir

has been simmering for eleven months.

Every Lunar New Year, he throws it away.

Niamh delivers three pizzas a day

on a bike with a dying battery.

She is fifteen days off her medication,

and she is starting to see things.

Then Wang's niece arrives from Hong Kong

with a Rimowa suitcase, a laser measure

and a sealed envelope from her father.

Her feng shui is impeccable.

Her timing is not.

The city is going cold.

The demons are fading.

And the elixir is missing one ingredient.

A comic, tender, slightly unhinged

London novel about a city going cold,

and the people (and demons)

who refuse to.

SORY isn't a typo.

It's a demon's apology.