Mandrill by Adam Preston – Synopsis

Following interest from a major New York literary agent this book is currently undergoing a rewrite. 

Up eight flights of stairs in London’s Bayswater Richard, a proofreader, nurses a broken heart and an old leg injury. 

He spends his days checking banal manuscripts and obsessing over how to make the perfect cup of tea. He would be content to live like this forever but his landlord has put the apartment on the market and the outside world refuses to leave him in peace.

Richard’s roommate is a young publishing intern called Ollie, an idealist who dreams of living in harmony with nature. Ollie has run out of patience with Richard but when he falls for an ambitious young publishing executive at the office (Sarah) his own lack of progress in the world comes sharply into focus. Egged on by his new lover he is soon gambling on a bit of private enterprise – secretly publishing a book he found in the company ’slush pile’. Entitled The Art of Longevity it is written by a once-famous Taoist health nut called Dr. Rufus Zahn. The book expounds on the life-extending properties of a lively sex life and steamed vegetables. 

Richard’s dream of being left in peace is soon shattered. The woman who once eviscerated his heart, Jessica, reappears in his life when she and her alpha male boyfriend become interested in buying the apartment. The boyfriend (Nick) is a buyer for a big bookstore chain and he shows interest in The Art of Longevity. In an attempt to impress Jessica, Richard pretends to be the publisher and when Ollie realises his enterprise now has a chance of success he signs Richard up as his partner. Meanwhile Sarah eggs them on from the sidelines while keeping her distance from Dr Mandrill, with whom she has history.

Dr. Mandrill invites himself to stay so he can oversee the editing of his latest masterpiece. He is monstrously arrogant, with a primordial sense of entitlement, and he quickly drags Richard and Ollie into a series of hideous disasters. Olly loses his job, his relationship with Sarah is destroyed and even his friendship with Richard goes up in flames. The chaos spirals further out of control when Dr Mandrill at first vanishes and then is tracked down, dangerously ill (and more deluded than ever), in hospital. 

Despite all this Dr Mandrill proves to be the catalyst that gets things moving in the, until now, paralysed world’s of Olly and Richard. Richard emerges with a new sense of direction, a sparky and intelligent girlfriend (Anita) and a markedly improved left leg. Ollie’s pastoral idyl ceases to be an idle dream and even Dr Mandrill turns out not to be the total charlatan everyone had come to believe. They even manage to create a book.

Mandrill is a story about lost, wounded and directionless men and the feisty ambitious women who inspire, coral and shape them. The book takes a humorous look at the world of publishing, with its monstrous egos and intense commercialisation.  Above all Mandrill is a love letter to the written word, heavily disguised as an outrageous tale about apparently hopeless people who somehow manage to conjure up some real happiness and even a little bit of glory.