In an attic in Southwest London, an acid factory has just been dismantled. Six students, among them the luminously sexy Belle, are speeding in a decommissioned ambulance towards a tiny cottage in the Welsh borders. Two homicidal drug dealers and one middle-aged police inspector are giving chase.

Meanwhile, Belle's jilted lover Angus stares out of his cottage window at shadows sliding across the grassy hillside, listens to squirrels fidgeting in the eaves and turns his thoughts to a squadron of young Japanese pilots, setting out from a Kyushu airstrip in 1945 intent on restarting the Second World War.

And that's just the beginning...

In this fresh and exciting debut novel, Tom Bullough brilliantly combines the best rites-of-passage storytelling with the helter-skelter adroitness of a road movie.