Ashley James Stokes

The Syllabus of Errors Ashley James Stokes

THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS is a story sequence, a mixture of contemporary and historical episodes. A cast of loners and romantics explore how our anxious present is mirrored in the uncertainties of the inter-war period with its crashes and crises. Ultimately it conveys a coded warning from history about what can come to fill the void when universally accepted notions of democracy and liberal capitalism are being questioned as now. The restless and rootless characters dream of idealized cities or moments in the personal or historical past which they feel could offer their escape. Historically - Sally Bowles and Fritz Lang's "M" join hands in Weimar Berlin, a faceless soldier wanders through a war-torn city looking for his lost love, an artist high on modernism gets caught up in a political assassination in Fascist Italy. Personally they dream of capturing that unfulfilled promise, that missed perfect kiss, that unresolved moment, that thing that should have lived. 'Lovers of mitteleuropa period fiction, or of contemporary fiction, or - ideally - both, will love this book. It's Joseph Roth meets Roberto Bolaño, and it is simply wonderful.' DAVID ROSE: author Vault: An Anti-Novel