Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

A man is thrown out of his home after his wife discovers that the sweat-smudged footprint on the inside of his windscreen doesn't match her own.

Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods.

A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.

In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily, hilariously try to reassemble themselves.

His characters - marauding Vikings, washed-up entrepreneurs and jobbing hacks on local papers - are adrift from the mainstream, confused by contemporary masculinity, angry and aimless.

Combining electric prose with compassion and dark wit, this is a major debut.