“If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the Mob would never have burnt down the Orphanage.”

So begins the hilarious, genre-busting tale of Jude, a Tipperary-reared orphan who on his 18th birthday sets off to discover the wide world and his true parentage. His picaresque adventures take him first to the “Sodom of the West” - Galway - where he falls in love, encounters temptations galore and, disguised as Stephen Hawking, unwittingly blows up the HQ of a Multi-National Corporation - and himself.

With his face reconstructed into the spitting image of Leonardo DiCaprio (apart from the small matter of an erectile nose) Jude travels on foot to the inferno of Dublin, in hot pursuit of Angela, ex-Galway chipshop employee and his True Love. A spectacular chase through the city of Ulysses ensues, transformed by Gough’s talent into a dazzling metaphor of 21st century violence, alienation and progress.

Jude is, in the author’s words, “An attempt to write the most serious comic novel of the young millennium”; it is certainly one of the funniest. Levels II and III will be published online in instalments, beginning in July 2007, with a hardback of the whole to follow in 2008.

'Click here to read Julian's brilliant essay on the modern novel, published in this month's Prospect.'