What do you do when your girlfriend disappears and your best friend commits suicide? Glen McGregor's answer is to get mind-numbingly drunk. But as bad as things are, they can always get worse, and soon he is being hampered in his quest for drunken oblivion by the lies and duplicity of his unsavoury past. Before long he is on a reluctant collision course with the truth, his progress hindered by M15, The Met Police, a plethora of dead bodies, and an overwhelming desire to run away and hide. Fragile State is a poignant, richly textured novel about friends and lovers, and the other, darker lives that they may lead