Title: The Buddha Bar

Author: Joseph Ridgwell

Date: July 2011

Publisher: Blackheath Books

Website: www.blackheathbooks.org.uk

ISBN: ISBN-10: 1-906099-27-8  / ISBN-13: 978-1-906099-27-5

It is with great pleasure that blackheath books introduce their fourth hotly anticipated Joseph Ridgwell publication. His second novel: The Buddha Bar.

Following on from events portrayed in Ridgwell’s cult classic, Last Days of the Cross, the book kicks off in a Malaysian beach hut. A rudimentary abode our eponymous hero shares with his only companion, a knife-wielding, coconut decapitating Croatian called Karl

After a series of adventures, the new friends find themselves in the pretty Thai riverside town of Sang Som ruminating on how to extend their travels indefinitely. The idea of ever going home being anathema to both.

It is in this idyllic setting that they hook up with the irrepressible, Mindi, who it appears, has the answer to all their problems. After an all night booze session at the appropriately named, Great Golden Phallus, the idea of owning and running a tiny beach bar is tossed into the fetid and oppressive tropical air…

Within days of the, ‘offer he couldn’t refuse.’ Ridgwell finds himself co-proprietor of the world’s smallest drinking establishment, The Buddha Bar. From here on in the action intensifies. With bar girls, bar flies, jealous ex-husbands, corrupt police, monsoons, mosquitoes, rat infestations, drug binges, international terrorism, excessive drinking, and border runs to contend with, events spiral out of control and life takes a far darker turn…

Incorporating tantalising flashes of the literary genre he invented, Cosmic Realism, and utilising his trademark short, sharp sentences, mind-bending language, and honed-to-the-bone description, Ridgwell has crafted another underground classic. A comically unspeakable tale expertly held together by his fiendishly degenerate and subversive literary hand.