Confessions of an Ageing Cyclist

The summer of 1992 should have been about bikes, freedom, long holidays, school projects, new trousers, first crushes and the glorious promise of the open road.

For Goodboy, it becomes something else entirely.

Told through the unruly, comic and painfully perceptive diary entries of a boy on the brink of secondary school, Confessions of an Ageing Cyclist follows a family trying — and failing — to manage a crisis without naming it. Adults stop talking when children enter the room. Hospital visits are disguised as “business”. Strange words are overheard, misunderstood and folded into the muddle of childhood: prostate, biopsy, catheter, cancer.

Loosely shadowing the stages of the 1992 Tour de France, the novel uses cycling not as a tale of sporting glory, but as a way of thinking about effort, fear, maps, wrong turns, breakdowns and survival. Goodboy’s bike is escape, identity, inheritance and consolation. It is also fragile, unreliable and sometimes taken away just when he needs it most.

At its heart, this is a book about prostate cancer and its impact on a family: not as a neat medical story, but as a force that rearranges language, time, behaviour and love. Through Goodboy’s partial understanding, the adult world becomes both absurd and terrifying — full of euphemisms, hospital corridors, NHS waiting, family arguments, overheard truths and silences that say too much.

Funny, tender, angry and moving, Confessions of an Ageing Cyclist is a story about childhood under pressure, about illness entering a home by stealth, about grief before and after loss, and about the stubborn human instinct to keep pedalling, even when the map no longer makes sense.