A working-class writer rails against the corporate world and small-mindedness in a striking debut novel written as a monologue

Mark Bowles’s striking debut explores working-class identity, masculinity and alienation. Like the author, Bowles’s narrator Henry Nash grew up in West Yorkshire and studied at Oxford, where he wore his learning “like a trench coat on a summer’s day” and struggled to fit in with his peers. Now he teaches in London, writes books and dreams of escaping the “anti-intellectual” English who “hate anything which doesn’t return them to the prosaic and the everyday”. Instead, he divides his time between London, Paris and Rome, “spending 50 weeks in the former and two in the others”.

All My Precious Madness is written as a monologue. Henry rails against a world dedicated to the pursuit of money. He directs his anger at the digital consultant he nicknames Cahun (after the French surrealist), who frequents the same Soho cafe and destroys Henry’s peaceful contemplation with his loud sales patter and inane chat on his phone. He reminds Henry of the decade he spent working in the “moral wasteland” of a telesales company.

All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles is published by Galley Beggar Press (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply