We Can't All Be Astronauts - Launch Parties

Oh look. It's me with my ridiculous pudgy face, gazing down like a proud father on my very first book. It's all downhill from here. Thirty years from now, that book will keep a tattered copy of this photo in its shirt pocket, taking it out between slugs of bourbon to stare at my face with a mixture of longing and rage. Why weren't you there for me, Dad? Why didn't you care?

So. Look, there are two launch events to celebrate the fact that We Can't All Be Astronauts hasn't been smothered in its crib, one at Borders bookshop in Norwich on Friday June 5 starting 5:30pm, and one at the Book Club Boutique in London on Monday June 8 starting 7pm. You can find details for the Norwich launch here, and details for the London launch here.

I don't want to gush like a gauche wazzock, but I'm really looking forward to both, because I've managed to cobble together an awesome support line-up out of people who appear in the book. The Norwich launch has support from John Osborne, ('Osborne is this season's hot property' - Horncastle News) whose first book, Radio Head, about British radio, is due out next month (and which you can pre-order here - go on, it's one of those rare, genuinely good reads) and also from mythic poetry godfather Yanny Mac, who you may remember from his interview here - one of the most popular I've done! Afterwards, we'll all head out to the pub and lark around as if we've forgotten we're just temporarily sentient aggregations of meat that will rot back into the soil, every memory and trace of our identities completely, irrevocably obliterated. The London launch has support from my two cohorts from the recent Found In Translation tour, poet Ross Sutherland, whose first collection is called Things To Do Before You Leave Town, and author and poet Joe Dunthorne, whose acclaimed first novel, Submarine, is out in paperback from Hamish Hamilton. Completing the line-up is Steve Aylett, prolific, award-winning author of novels such as Slaughtermatic, Lint, Shamanspace, Dummyland, and many more. I know it sounds ludicrously hyperbolic, but now I think about it, you've basically got one of the UK's best poets and two of the UK's most talented novelists there... plus me. Then afterwards there's music and DJs and drinking til midnight!

The mental thing is, both nights are free. And everyone will have books available for signing. If you're a reader of this blog, you are cordially invited. We'd love to see you there. Let's meet up and talk about hundreds of things. I only get to have a debut book launch once. The rest of my life will be a dreary anticlimax. Please - catch me on the upswing, eh?