Almost Persuaded is a comic rites of passage novel set at the end of the last millennium. It follows Tony Palmer on his roller-coaster pilgrimage without purpose, through a jungle of sex, love, religion, technology, crime, family politics and country music.

As the novel opens he is a recently dumped software engineer in his late twenties, working on the well-paid drudgery of the Millennium bug - a possibly pointless exercise that mirrors his entire life. He is theoretically in his prime and he is free; but this means he is also totally rootless. He is a (very) lapsed Catholic; he is single with no dependents; his parents are dead and his siblings either estranged or simply strange. He can do what he wants, but he is not sure what that is, and his recent experiences have taught him nothing more than that you can't trust anybody or anything - including yourself.

A residential course on the mind-numbingly dull subject of Project Management seems an unlikely place for that to change, but it is.