So begins the remarkable tale of Firmin the rat. Born in a bookstore in a blighted 1960's Boston neighborhood, Firmin miraculously learns how to read by digesting his nest of books. Alienated from his family and unable to communicate with the humans he loves, Firmin quickly realizes that a literate rat is a lonely rat.

Following a harrowing misunderstanding with his hero, the bookseller, Firmin begins to risk the dangers of Scollay Square, finding solace in the Lovelies of the burlesque cinema. Finally adopted by a down-on-his-luck science fiction writer, the tide begins to turn, but soon they both face homelessness when the wrecking ball of urban renewal arrives.

In a series of misadventures, Firmin is ultimately led deep into his own imaginative soul-a place where Ginger Rogers can hold him tight and tattered books, storied neighborhoods, and down-and-out rats can find people who adore them.

A native of South Carolina, Sam Savage now lives in Madison, Wisconsin. This is his first novel.

Beginning in July, during the economic hardships of the Nixon era, we witness our hero hounded by tenants and creditors, harassed by a loathsome local arts group, and tormented by his ex-wife. Determined to redeem his failures and eviscerate his enemies, Whittaker hatches a grand plan. But as winter nears, his difficulties accumulate, and the disorder of his life threatens to overwhelm him. As his hold on reality weakens and his schemes grow wilder, his self-image as a placid and slow-moving sloth evolves into that of a bizarre and frantic creature driven mad by solitude.

In this tragicomic portrait of a literary life, Sam Savage proves that all the evidence is in the writing, that all the world is, indeed, a stage, and that escape from the mind’s prison requires a command performance.

Sam Savage is the best-selling author of Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, a debut novel selected as an American Library Association Notable Book and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award finalist. A native of South Carolina, he now lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

What that other life is and how Effie and Janet each in her own way finds it in the course of an eventful and uproarious year is the story told by this unusual novel.

And it tells it at breakneck speed in an energetic loose-jointed rhyming verse that veers easily from Shel Silverstein-like jingles to melancholic passages of great poetic beauty. The book can be read - preferably aloud - in a couple of hours. Broadly comical and satiric, unabashedly sentimental, and at the same time savvy and gritty, it is one to be read again and again.