27 unnumbered and separately bound chapters delivered in a cardboard box in apparently random order2 and ranging between a mere 10 lines to 12 pages in length – this is B. S. Johnson’s 1969 novel The Unfortunates. The Unfortunates is the interior monologue of an ambitious if unsuccessful writer who has to make a living as a football reporter, sent to report a match in an unnamed city3 – recognizable as Nottingham – and who, only as he leaves the train, realizes that this is a city he knows well as the city in which, as a young writer, he had spent a lot of time with his then best friend, Tony, an aspiring literary scholar, who had died of cancer at the age of 29 a few years before the time of the novel.4 The entire narrative then oscillates between the narrator’s rendering of the hours spent in the city before, during and after the match and analepses to time spent with Tony, memories frequently triggered by visual cues during the city walk. Thus, a pub on a corner may remind the narrator of time spent there with Tony or, in a more erratic movement of the mind, the built environment of the train station reminds him he is in Nottingham, which, in turn, conjures up Tony’s emaciated face, as happens in the opening passage quoted above.