A young man sits on a bench looking out at the harbour of a ­French-Spanish border town. Ahead of him, either a ­cash-strapped existence strolling the sun-baked avenues of Seville, where deep shadows conceal a sense of uncanny potential, or the cooler embrace of the daily grind back in the US. Granville, cut adrift in Europe by circumstance, has a choice to make.

His solution is not to.

This daring, experimental novel addresses the existential dilemma of location, how the regret of a choice not made may overpower the satisfaction of one taken. In his debut, Simon Kinch explores the nature of longing and unfulfilment, romance and rejection, freedom and opposition.