FINGERLESS GLOVES, the prize-winning novel from New Yorker Nick Orsini, went on sale to e-book readers around the world today.

The story, which won the prestigious Fiction Fast-Track new writing competition earlier this year, charts the most difficult night in 25-year-old Anton Duchamp’s life.

When his best friend James Squire is mysteriously rushed to hospital, Anton begins a night-long journey that takes him from shady, marijuana-smoke-filled apartments to ex-girlfriends’ bedrooms, and eventually back to his childhood home.

As the night unfolds, so do new revelations about Anton’s recreational drug use and his past failures. And as Friday night drags into Saturday morning, he learns of James’s deteriorating health. In a universe that has seemingly left him without a specific function, it takes a single night for Anton to realize that no one will ever hand him a meaning or a purpose.

Fingerless Gloves, which is published by London-based ApostropheBooks.com, is about best friends and the mistakes we never knew we were making. It is a story about remembering – by any means necessary.

It is available for e-readers from retailers including Amazon, Apple iBookstore and Kobo this week.

ApostropheBooks.com founder and bestselling author Martyn Forrester said: “Sometimes we see a piece of writing that makes this whole quest of ours worthwhile. We set up ApostropheBooks.com partly because traditional publishers could no longer afford to find and invest in new writers, and our faith was vindicated when Nick Orsini’s Fingerless Gloves hit our desks.

“Nick writes with a unique, distinctive voice and we expect great things of him. Comparisons are already being made with Brett Easton Ellis. You will be hearing a lot more of him and fellow ApostropheBooks.com novelist Robert Ford in the years to come.”

Twenty-six-year-old Orsini runs adorkablelife.com, a collection of poetry and has in his time worked in post-production, had a job as a limousine dispatcher and been a New York ad man. His first novel, Two Wrongs Make a Vice, was shipped to 40 countries around the world and all 50 US states.

He said: “I hope my new readers will take away the immediacy of Fingerless Gloves. I want this ebook to make people realize that growing up is not a switch we can turn on and off, but rather a process that’s often forged out of our most trying and difficult moments.

“I’ve had such an amazing amount of support from my family in New Jersey and my friends across the United States and abroad. From my first interviews to my small tours, they always told me that the best stories are the ones that we aren’t quite finished working through. They encouraged me when I couldn’t encourage myself. This is for each and every one of them.”

Below, Nick Orsini reads an extract from Fingerless Gloves: