The Last Hundred Days (46 page)

Leo waved it off. ‘Well, you know how it is… after all, experience is what you want in a whore…’

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 of Belgian and Newcastle Irish parents. Brought up in various countries, including Iran, Venezuela, France and Belgium, he studied at Cambridge, York and Oxford. He is the author of two collections of poems,
The Canals of Mars
and
Jilted City,
which have been translated into several languages, and of various books on French and British literature. He has won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry, the Levinson Prize from the American Poetry Foundation, and in 2009 was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques for services to French culture. He has also written and presented programmes for radio, including the Radio Three features ‘A Short History of Stupidity’ and ‘The Art of Idleness’.

He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University, and lives in Caernarfon, Wales. This is his first novel.