He says he's now found a writing style he feels comfortable with, "a way I actually talk to my mates", though he leaves out the you-knows and know-what-I-means that pepper his conversation. People may very well think the worst after they read his novel, which is full of misanthropy ("I was grateful I wasn't ugly; I didn't have to strive for wealth to avoid a life of substandard sexual partners") and racial stereotyping ("in adolescence a lot of blacks, encouraged by the anomic rantings of rap music, adopt a sordid boorish persona . I watched the white girls on the dance floor, swirling their hair, waving their arms and strutting back and forth; they were having a whale of a time.

When he was 11, his father went bankrupt and descended into manic depression; Nirpal then became "this horrible teen - vicious, selfish . Dhaliwal's eyes, seen through his famously long eyelashes (both his book and his wife's mention them approvingly) glint with excitement. A successful but middle aged and somewhat pathetic male character gets parachuted into the story just to make some point about the author at least not being white and pathetic.He says he hasn't done his book as a response to Liz's writing, to put over his side, but admits subconsciously there may be something like that going on. So when she wrote about you not having sex for, what, eight months, you were having sex, just not with her? I know that Nirpal has paid for sex (from Liz's columns, obviously), and I want to know if the description in the book is the same as his own. Trapped in a spiral of depression and isolation, every day – holidays included – merged into the same flatline of sadness.

Bhupinder 'Puppy' Singh Johal has left behind the immigrant neighbourhood of Southall to mix with the elite of metropolitan London society. Read more of money, race and sex: an incendiary cocktail that explodes, changing him and those closest to him forever.We carry a wide selection of titles in sci fi fantasy and horror, The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences.