A writer who calls himself Orpheus lives in a dilapidated attic where the walls are covered in damp spots that resemble “the flora and fauna that bloom and thrive only in dreams”.  He loves a girl called Eurydice, philosophizes with his friend Igor/Billy Wiseass and plays a lute. The Attic is a novel of autumnal melancholy, flights of fancy, self-mythologizing, and messing around (because you’re young, bohemian etc), which ends up venturing down to the courtyard where the writer catches a glimpse of the lives and sensations he almost failed to notice in his self-absorption. It is also a novel about trying to fit all of this into a novel called The Attic. The result is delightfully polymorphous, and, in its way, endearingly earnest.