"A book based on a soundtrack score that has not yet been composed for a feature film that does not yet exist." Pixies frontman Black Francis has approached writing his first book as he would do a song: with inventiveness and originality. The Good Inn tells the story of an eighteen-year-old known only as Soldier Boy who, after escaping a devastating explosion at the French port of Toulon, sets out on a bizarre journey across France. Navigating his way past homicidal gypsies, combative soldiers and porn-peddling peasants, he takes refuge at The Good Inn - and promptly finds himself centre stage in the making of the world's first narrative pornographic movie. Unique and vividly imagined, The Good Inn is a touchingly comic story that brings turn-of-the-century France to life.

Jesse and Lee share a house owned by a very nice Chinese dentist, where it rains in the hall. They move to cabins on the cliffs at Big Sur where the deafening croaks of frogs can be temporarily silenced by the cry, 'Campbell's Soup'. Ultimately, we learn how the frogs are permanently silenced . . . and dreams disperse around a fire into 186,000 endings per second. In anticipating flower power and the ideals of the Sixties, Brautigan's debut novel was at least a decade before its time and remains a weird and brilliant classic.