Mr. Breakfast

From one of the great modern masters of the fantastic, “A beautiful, brilliant, meditation on art, love, inspiration and what makes life worthwhile."-- Neil Gaiman

Graham Patterson is a middling comedian whose career (and love life) has gone up in smoke. After buying a new car, he embarks on a cross country road trip to see his brother Joel, to try and figure what he should do with himself and his career. Midway, after his car breaks down, he enters a tattoo parlor, mesmerized by the unique beauty of the tattoo work on display.  After paging through a catalog of styles, he chooses a very rare tattoo -- a bee inside a frog inside a hawk inside a lion-- that the tattooist's Japanese mentor created. It is a tattoo with strange qualities, to the extent that the tattoo will allow the protagonist to explore alternative versions of his own life and ultimately choose his preferred life. This was something the tattooist was once offered but she preferred to keep the life she had.
 
From this moment on, Graham Patterson will no longer be a simple comedian on the path of decline, nor a man who has to decide whether to marry his partner with whom he is deeply in love, nor the great world-famous photographer that everyone knows and admires for the famous image depicting Mr. Breakfast. From this moment Graham Patterson will gain the opportunity to travel in three different lives, until he finally gets to choose one, the definitive one. At what price, though? And how to choose between fame and love?

Jonathan Carroll is the author of seventeen novels, including the critically acclaimed The Ghost in Love, The Land of Laughs, and Outside the Dog Museum, for which he has won a British Fantasy award. Jonathan has also written two story collections, with his stories winning a Pushcart Prize, two French Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a World Fantasy Award. His work has been published in over thirty languages, and he has over 110,000 followers on Facebook.