After nine books, Nick Earls is renowned for his slacker-male novels and his short stories of twenty-somethings in various stage of arrested development. Like his English equivalent Nick Homby, Earls specialises in a particular emotional state of the male psyche: a post-adolescent, pre-adult period usually spent chasing unobtainable women, getting drunk on green alcoholic beverages and behaving badly in amusing ways. Written with self-deprecating wit and dollops of humour, Earls’s previous books are the equivalent of a fizzy soft drink, easily ingested and with a sugary residue.