I AM MAX LAMM

Max Lamm, an athletic Jewish-Australian scholar, moves to London to escape the internet sex scandal that destroyed his tennis career. Alone and drinking heavily, he has slowly rebuilt his life. Then one drunken night in Camden, he accidentally kills a fifteen year-old Pakistani boy who tries to mug him. To evade the police, Lamm hides in a hole underneath a barbeque in Hyde Park. In the Pakistani quarter of the East End, a street protest against the murder erupts into violence. London experiences its worst race riot since the Brixton bloodshed of 1981.

Six months earlier in Washington DC, a young heiress lives in despair. She is Kelly Wesson, the daughter of a powerful Republican senator. Kelly is privileged and beautiful, but is miserably addicted to a cocktail of drugs. Kelly's father forces her into military service at the Maryland National Guard barracks, where she regains her will to live (and experiences sexual fulfilment) by bizarrely abusing her male inferiors. Now Kelly, too, has escaped to a new life in London. In Hyde Park, Kelly encounters Max Lamm. Their physical attraction is immediate. She invites him back to her father's penthouse.

I AM MAX LAMM is a darkly humourous exploration of family loyalty, disgrace and collective hysteria in the age of terror. As London suffers its first race riot in a generation, Kelly must choose whether to save the father who nearly destroyed her, or to love the fugitive whose fatal mistake has shocked a nation.

Raph Brous has studied neuroscience and law at Monash University. He is also a musician as well as a campaign director with Animal Liberation Victoria. I AM MAX LAMM is his first novel.