Jonathan Dee (2022) Sugar Street.

Existential Nihilism. Aye, I don’t know what that means either. Some books leave you feeling flat. Others make you think. One of the questions you might ask yourself is ‘Why did I bother reading over 200 pages?’ There are no good answers.

Sugar Street is a simple story. The title is the name of the street, the narrator lives in. There’s an immigrant community whom his landlady hates—as she hates almost everything and everybody, including him. She’s all for sending them back.

He pays cash for the room. He’s her first tenant. Nobody else offered to rent it. For him it’s perfect. Nobody knows he’s there. No records or receipts. No cameras. No internet. Nothing much happens. He likes it that way. He’s no past. No future. He’s trying to erase himself from humanity.

Anton Chekhov’s much quoted maxim. “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”

In this case the loaded gun is $168,548 in cash the narrator hides under his mattress. Read on?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6