Lex is all but finished growing up in Clifden, Connemara, where he runs a radio station from his bedroom and makes plans to go to university in London. As he shares his views on life, music and Michelle, the best girl in town, Lex is absurdly acute and brilliantly entertaining. Michelle is not only older than Lex, but she's dating the town thug, someone Lex would do well to avoid, but where's the fun in that? Surrounded by his adoring family and constantly taking the flak for his crazy best friend, Davey, he's caught between modesty and an edge of cool. But he finds himself in trouble when a friend uses Lex's own radio station to announce to the entire town that Lex is still a virgin and asks some nice young girl to help him out before he heads to London in the same state...Especially when Lex accidentally lets slip he'd like that nice girl to be Michelle. Being seventeen is the stuff of rollercoasters - from one period of angst to boundless joy and on to another crisis - and Lex's summer is set to be typical. He's organised a major music festival in Clifden, or so he's told his favourite band, Toots and the Maytals. But when Davey's mother gets sick and he loses his temper one too many times, Ireland's answer to Glastonbury may not happen at all. With all his dreams falling around his ankles, Lex is determined to go out with a bang, leaving the town reeling with his loss. And he will, but it might not be quite what he had in mind.

'The character of Lex is as forthright as he is vulnerable, as solicitous as he is selfish, as altruistic as he is vainglorious, and therefore perfectly epitomises the morass of contradictions that makes up the teenage male passing into adulthood. Lex is as warm, funny, evocative and toe-curlingly accurate a portrait of small-town adolescence as I have had the pleasure to read' Christopher Brookmyre. 'A funny and charming story set in one of my favourite places in the world. And it was a great relief to discover it wasn't just me who felt like that at seventeen' John O'Farrell.

James Mylet is in his early thirties and lives in South London with his wife and son.