Toytown West

Lonely. Broke. Unloved. One-eyed. Prone to daydreams. Just getting through each day is hard enough for a bear like Pushkin. He doesn’t need a beautiful stranger knocking at his door and filling his head with mysteries. Or a job at a jam factory. Or an unhinged badger persuading him to be a performance poet. He doesn’t need Hamlet Pig of the Toytown Peace and Protection Agency on his tail, or militant action men accusing him of treason. He could do without getting stuck in tunnels with armies of excitable clockwork rats, or making the acquaintance of a four-wheeled biscuit tin stuffed full of cuckoo clockwork, prophesies and stolen souls. He could get be without any of that. He did nothing to deserve it. But as Toytown edges further towards chaos and civil war, its citizens – governors, revolutionaries, idealists, the faithless and the murderous – need to find a leader, a messiah, a scapegoat and a friend. And in Pushkin they find all of these. Which is really the last thing he needs.