Drowning is Fine

‘Angry. Funny. Nightmarish. ArseHole-ish. Painful and sad …a tremendously smart, darkly comic, and surprisingly moving tale of life in today’s London. It will definitely get your head spinning. You may even discover it’s your own life in print…’

Terry Gilliam

My Life is a Trombone

Daniel Hickman will do whatever it takes to become a great artist. He escapes from a meaningless job by fabricating mental illness and he escapes from an equally meaningless art scene by fabricating tiny clay heads. But nothing seems to give him the freedom he craves until one of the more bizarre of Daniel’s romantic failures leads him to an emotional Armageddon that threatens to obliterate him.

Drowning is Fine, is the tragi-comic coming-of-age story of Daniel Hickman, a young man struggling to survive as a sane man in love and an artist in dystopian London; goals which turn out to be two aspects of the same apocalyptic mission—to see the world as it is, in all its sordid beauty.

DROWNING IS FINE IS OUT NOW.

You can buy an expensive copy in my shop, or a much cheaper copy from most (many? some? definitely some) standard online bookstores.

Ben Sutherland – Bridge over Peckham CC BY 2.0

Reader Reviews

…brutally honest, funny, bleak, painful and has a clear ring of truth about it …I literally can’t think of any other writer living today who understands these times with the same clarity as Darren Allen.

Amazon Review (Tom Fryer)

…bloody good …the last forty pages or so are utterly brilliant

Goodreads review (‘Derek James Baldwin’)

For all his faults, Hickman is a modern-day Blakeian mystic in a culture where this can never mean anything outside the dubious romance of self-sabotage and self-destruction, hence why Daniel’s arseholish nature rises to the fore in a novel whose conventional form only reanimates the ghost of [our] highest values.

Steve Mitchelmore (This Space: read his full review here: bit.ly/3zB6BpE)

I think it’s a fucking masterpiece. It’s everything I look for and long for in a novel, and so rarely find. It’s magical, it’s Art with a capital A. It’s already leapt into my Holy of Holies category of beloved books.

Email (‘Jeanne’)

I loved it. I’d pretty much given up on modern novels, finding them strangely blank.

Twitter comment (‘Garry’)

A genuine personally relatable story about self-development and discovery about what’s what through mistakes, calamities, grim happenings, and confusion. Essentially – what we know as – REAL LIFE… I don’t know any other [book which has] made me have a few existential crises AND made me laugh hysterically.

Amazon review (‘Jack’)

…the insights and wisdom at the core of this book make it both moving and tragi-comic and lend it great depth, often lacking in modern literature.

Amazon Review (‘David Moore’)

One of the best I read about friendship, love, and existential questions. The novel is a blend of satirical, tragical, philosophical inquires to capture the absurdity of human predicament.

Goodreads review (‘Olesia Altynbaeva’)

Intensely evocative and gripping, transporting even.

Email (‘Yin’)

A tremendous novel which disturbed me so deeply that I laid awake for many hours upon its completion knowing that I, like Daniel, am metaphorically stuffing rocks into my pockets in order to discover that drowning is indeed fine.

Reader Email (‘Ben’)

I thought nobody wrote books like this any more! takes a dive into the belly of the world with grace, humour and wisdom …shades of Celine, Hamsun, Bukowski and Miller.

Amazon review (‘N J.’)