This revelatory semi-autobiographical debut from Belfast-born novelist Robert McLiam Wilson is the newest entry into Write Brain TV’s ever-growing radical library.

Ripley Bogle tells the story of a gifted young Irish student who moves to England to attend Cambridge, only to promptly drop-out and descend into a life of homelessness on the vicious streets of London’s underbelly. Written in an first-person, overflowing stream-of-consciousness style, the unreliable narrator wanders the streets while addressing the reader with scathing critiques of modern society, charming-yet-vulgar reflections on his childhood in bombed-out, Troubles-era Northern Ireland, and the myriad of hardships and bodily devastation that are so prevalent when living on the street.

Written when Wilson was in his mid-20’s, this coming-of-age tale is almost a parody of the Bildungsroman genre, while simultaneously ringing with the erratic exuberance of youth and a blinding confidence only found in debut literary works. The poetic-if-sometimes-overwrought prose is truly a spectacle to behold, and the attention to the minutiae of street life gives the rambling plot a polish of authenticity, something Dickens would have written if he was squatting in an abandoned flophouse during the Punk years.