The fifth in Malcolm Pryce's cult Louie Knight series which has sold 200,000 copies through Bookscan and was recently re-jacketed with a stylish new noir look Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, 2010 For fans of Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, Mark Gattis, Giles Brandreth

It is a sweltering August in Aberystwyth. A man wearing a Soviet museum curator's uniform walks into Louie Knight's office and spins a wild and impossible tale of love, death, madness and betrayal. Sure, Louie had heard about Hughesovka, the legendary replica of Aberystwyth built in the Ukraine by some crazy nineteenth-century czar. But he hadn't believed that it really existed until he met Uncle Vanya. Now the old man's story catapults him into the neon-drenched wilderness of Aberystwyth Prom in search of a girl who mysteriously disappeared thirty years ago. Soon Louie finds his fate depending on two most unlikely talismans - -a ticket to Hughesovka and a Russian cosmonaut's sock.