Slogging through the miles of a city marathon, an 11-year-old boy encounters small miracles; about to marry one of her patients in a home for the elderly, a nurse asks her estranged son to come to the wedding and give her away; home from university, a young man has Christmas dinner with his hard-up dad in a bistro behind a rural gas bar.

Men and boys and maleness, money and its lack, the long haunt of childhood, marriage and divorce — these lie at the heart of The Ambassador of What. Driven by an ear for how we talk, how we feel, how we fail, and how we love, these are tough and tender stories that take hold, and linger.

'Adrian's characters are torn between the almost sense-less intellectual life promised them by literature and their education, and their sweaty, violent, and violated origins in the world of hopeless work and father-and-son struggles to keep failure at bay.' — award-winning poet Richard Harrison