Comment: “A chilling indictment of worldwide regulatory failure” – or, the book beneath the book

Five newspapers in the UK have given a unanimous four-star thumbs-up to Outlaws Inc. – and with some hearteningly perceptive reviews that took me a little by surprise. The Liverpool Echo, Edinburgh Evening News and Yorkshire Post among others, and especially this review (below), from the Manchester Evening News, hit the nail on the head in a way that a lot of the gung-ho stuff misses.

Because for all the adventure, the anecdote and the fist-person element, I suppose I think what I might have ended up writing, without trying to really, was a book about what happens when governments take their hands off the wheel.

I trace the journey of Mickey and the rest of the now-stateless ‘outlaws’ whose country – along with all its certainties and the future it offered them – was snatched away by economic crisis. But somewhere deep down I know, as does the guy from the MEN – that it’s also a book about everything that’s happening now, to us. Read the review below, read the first chapter for free here, and let me know what you think.