Lucy Simon

Slum-dwellers and high-flyers

James Scudamore is evidently fascin- ated by borderline personality disorder. His characters veer between moments of machismo-fuelled rage, extravagant eloquence and intense introspection. The Amnesia Clinic (2007), which earned him the Somerset Maugham Award for writers under 35, was set in Ecuador and depicted the tribulations of adolescence. For his second, bolder novel, he crosses