Heathrow Nights

When they are excluded from a half term trip as a school punishment, Russell and his two friends decide to delay the inevitable consequences at home by taking a trip of their own. Nothing goes right and without a place to stay they eventually 'settle' at Heathrow. Here the strange dislocations of their lives are echoed and Russell, light-headed from sleeplessness, muses on the story of Hamlet and its parallels with his own life: dead father, mother recently remarried and his uneasy relationship with his own 'Claudius'. A flight of fancy in a strange twilight existence from which Russell is finally brought to earth by his step-father and they talk and drink their way into some kind of understanding. The book has a fine madness to it.