About the book

As the evening in pub De Kauw grew later, only more heads stumbled in and before you knew it everyone stood shoulder to shoulder, bobbing back and forth with nothing but the bar as buoy. Mist and sweat fought in the air, and next to you someone slurped the last bit of their Long Island Iced Tea from between the melting ice cubes. Soon there would be reluctant dancing, even though the floor had been sticky for weeks with beer.

For three years Frederik Willem Daem drifted from one pub to the next to write until closing time. From his experiences in that world comes his novel Signs of Life. Everything came together in De Kauw, here he sought refuge, waiting for what was and what was still to come, as the pub worked through its own loss. This debut novel is a dazzling book about addiction, detachment and advertising and reads like an intellectual haze you won’t quickly sober up from.