The Man Who Walks - Tapa blanda

After the scandalous theft of a pub's World Cup cash kitty, a homeless drifter pursues his eccentric uncle: 'The Man Who Walks', north, up into the Highlands to recover the money - a cool £27,000. The nephew's frantic, stalled progress and other bizarre diversions form Warner's fourth, wickedly hilarious novel.

But who is The Man Who Walks? Is he simply a water-carrying madman with one glass eye and a fondness for whisky and pony nuts, who collects old Christmas trees for money and old newspapers to make his home, and who has a physiological inability to handle slopes? Or is he a savant, touched by the hand of God, wandering the back roads along ancient, ancestral tracks? And as the sinister, unstable nephew gains on The Man Who Walks, and their paths begin to meet, can it be that it will all end in a field and that this field is Culloden Moor?

Since his first novel, Morvern Callar, Warner's fictional world has become a deliciously familiar one: a Scotland at once real and surreal, patrolled by Hollywood productions, ex-British Rail trolley-girls, crazed snowboarders and a sybaritic aristocracy. His writing is savage but learned, shot through with deviant sexuality and demented humour but, at the heart of this fierce and strange world, there is huge human tenderness, moments of extraordinary lyrical beauty and a ranging, breathtaking imagination.