Love Before Covid is the story of writer and English teacher Joe Pastorious. Joe is a jazz fan, a Leicester based poet, and a victim of horrendous sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of his mother. The book takes you on a trip through Joe's mind; a journey through real-time dialogues that emerge from his corrupted memories and dystopian dreams. The contents of Joe's unconscious tell us more about Joe than he could ever know, and perhaps more about our world than you could ever imagine.

In Love Before Covid, you will meet an altruist who can’t stand up for himself, a gregarious bartender who will do anything to get pregnant, a traumatised art historian who hates children, a successful Mexican writer who dislikes her own friends, a charming public intellectual who once violently disfigured her boyfriend, a tall beautiful dancer who hates fat people and a teenage genius who fantasises about his porn star mother.

You will also encounter passionate feminists, violent alcoholics, religious fanatics, sadistic parents, kind misanthropes, woke bisexuals, a woman who is pressured into cutting off her penis, female kick boxers, violent vegans and a successful therapist who has a habit of ruining people’s lives. The dialogues all co-exist within parallel realities, dreams within dreams, and very passionate and sometimes violent arguments.

You are left to your own devices to decide if you think there are any heroes or villains in this book. Whatever you decide, your moral boundaries will be pushed to the limit. And yes, before you ask, some of the characters in this book eventually catch Covid 19.

However there is always hope. For Joe Pastorious, that comes in the form of a psychopath named Janet Waverley.