An Observer book of the year HAUNTED By endless tiny humiliations. STRUGGLING To resurrect the corpse of his literary career. ENSNARED In a loving yet perplexing marriage. Anthony McGowan is a man at odds with the universe. Stumbling from one improbable fiasco to the next, he patrols the mean streets of West Hampstead like some unholy cross between Columbo, J. Alfred Prufrock and a common tramp, pondering the very stuff of life itself. For McGowan that's holed socks, unsatisfactory packed lunches, broken washing machines, Kierkegaard, the eccentricities of the British Library, liver salts, Morrissey and disapproving ladies on trains... Relentlessly honest, exquisitely funny, The Art of Failing is a paean to the glory and desperation of everyday existence.