“One of the most extraordinary, original—and funniest—books I have ever read. Subversive, satirical, like a farcical, erotic, animal-human animated film” (Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, author of Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things).
Shining moments of tender beauty punctuate this story of a youth on the run after escaping from an elite English boarding school. At London’s Euston Station, the narrator meets a talking dachshund named Mary and together they’re off on escapades through posh Mayfair streets and jaunts in a Rolls-Royce. But the youth soon realizes the seemingly sweet dog is a handful; an alcoholic, nymphomaniac, drug-addicted mess who can’t stay out of pubs or off the dance floor. In a world of abusive headmasters and other predators, the sexually omnivorous youth discovers that true friends are never needed more than on the mean streets of 1960s London, as he tries to save his beloved Mary from herself. On the Run with Mary mirrors the horrors and the joys of the terrible twentieth century. Jonathan Barrow’s original drawings accompany the text.
“A masterpiece by a young genius, fated to die shortly after he had completed it.” —A. N. Wilson, author of Prince Albert: The Man Who Saved the Monarchy
“A unique masterpiece from a bizarre mind. To say it’s Lewis Carroll meets Jean Genet . . . would be to belittle its farcically-filthy originality.” —Nicholas Haslam, author of Redeeming Features
“Dementedly cheerful . . . A rollicking catalogue of sex, violence, and acts of cartoonish cruelty, Barrow’s novel is a schoolboy’s happy nightmare writ large; readers may find it impossible to look away.” —Publishers Weekly
