When well-known storyteller Hilton Ellis, life-long exile, storyteller and B-movie actor, dies in Amsterdam, he leaves a book telling the stories of a range of colourful people whose evasions, lies and deceptions shaped his life.
Making a name for himself as a performer in the shadowy underground world, he encounters an anarchist intruder, a squatter slumlord, neo-Nazi punks, an opium addict, a spend-thrift painter, a storytelling bank robber, a gang of criminals on the run from the Regime, a fast-talking Beautiful Boy, the mysterous PLO agent Mr Mavros, the aristocratic Third Earl, former intelligence agent Barry Bravo, glamorous movie star Isabella Salazar, a Rohypnol-wielding black Zimbabwean and a crew of cynical expatriate journalists.
Meanwhile, he struggles to balance his friendship with an enigmatic former ANC guerilla who once climbed the Berlin Wall to freedom in the West and to escape the influence of a famous father.
Written during the last years of his life, his ‘book of liars’ is a reflection on a world where nothing is predictable and no one can be trusted. Intended to shock his friends and acquaintances and at the same time forgive them, the book, his swansong, is in the end a recognition that everyone ‘tells stories’.
Making a name for himself as a performer in the shadowy underground world, he encounters an anarchist intruder, a squatter slumlord, neo-Nazi punks, an opium addict, a spend-thrift painter, a storytelling bank robber, a gang of criminals on the run from the Regime, a fast-talking Beautiful Boy, the mysterous PLO agent Mr Mavros, the aristocratic Third Earl, former intelligence agent Barry Bravo, glamorous movie star Isabella Salazar, a Rohypnol-wielding black Zimbabwean and a crew of cynical expatriate journalists.
Meanwhile, he struggles to balance his friendship with an enigmatic former ANC guerilla who once climbed the Berlin Wall to freedom in the West and to escape the influence of a famous father.
Written during the last years of his life, his ‘book of liars’ is a reflection on a world where nothing is predictable and no one can be trusted. Intended to shock his friends and acquaintances and at the same time forgive them, the book, his swansong, is in the end a recognition that everyone ‘tells stories’.
