Dog Days in Soho — Nigel Richardson

Dog Days in Soho is the fictionalised biography of a real man. Its setting is the boozy penumbra of Fifties bohemia - and the increasingly erratic imagination of the biographer. The book's hero, a Cornish boy sailor called Josh Avery, fought, drank and loved his way through Soho's Golden Age. Francis Bacon was its most dazzling star, but others burned brightly through those overwrought days and nights, among them artist's model and bungling cat burglar Henrietta Moraes, the troubled painter Johnny Minton and the photographer John Deakin.
Josh Avery knew them all, and in his chaotic progress through bars and beds discovered an unspoken truth about the age they embodied: contrary to legend, it wasn't like some rollicking film from which one emerged blinking in the late afternoon light, feeling glad to be alive. Soho in the Fifties was a voluptuous nightmare whose protagonists rushed ever more desperately through those dark alleys, impelled by the promise of - what? Like Josh, his biographer grows obsessed with finding the answer to that question.