Waxed Exceeding Mighty - Softcover

Where once the whim of the Hebrew God determined the fate of that tribe’s greatest heroes, in Waxed Exceeding Mighty it is by the adulteries of seemingly everyone around him that Adam Athelstan is expelled from his garden, enslaved in the desert, enthroned in the jungle. Waxed Exceeding Mighty tells the epic story of Adam Athelstan, an angelic young man who grows and sells, and sings to, very rare flowers. When his cherished livelihood is crushed by a boat he has no choice but to take a job as a delivery driver for a florist. Mistakenly arrested as a foreign sex-worker, Adam is enslaved in the desert wilderness of an immigration detention centre. His naivete soon attracts a job offer and Adam is flown to paradisiacal Vietnam, where he tries to settle into his new vocation—returning gone-native tourists to their families. Unwaveringly polite in a lascivious world, Adam's innocence is set to be his only bulwark against the insatiable lusts of the universe.

Joshua Humphreys was born in Melbourne in 1985. He was miseducated at La Trobe University where he read Modern and Ancient History. He spent two years writing and performing in comedy plays and doing stand-up before deciding that he should be writing novels. So he has spent the last few years gallivanting around Europe, America, and Southeast Asia. In 2015 he published his first novel, Waxed Exceeding Mighty. For six weeks he smuggled copies of it into London bookstores and exhorted his social media followers to steal them. Thus was born #stealthisnovel. He is extremely fond of watermelon. The ferocity of his tap-dancing is unrivalled, except in China, where his style is derided as only semi-ferocious. His favourite films are Lethal Weapon 2 and Dragonheart. He is currently writing the screenplay for Armageddon 2—Liv Tyler’s emotional journey in learning to forgive Ben Affleck for leaving Bruce Willis on that asteroid. His favourite band is Limp Bizkit and yes his Fred Durst impersonation is astonishing. In 2009 Humphreys travelled to East Africa, where he was one of the first white men to see an ostrich eat nails. In 2012 he went to the Holy Land where he, like fellow monarchs Edward VII and George V before him, had a Jerusalem cross tattooed on his forearm; he brags now about how good his hummus is. He was for a brief interlude in 2013 the wolfcatcher royale to His Highness The Duke of Bavaria and later that year went to Capri, where he assaulted a woman in the forehead with a crayfish. In 2014 he travelled through Central America—in Belize was taught how to make rice wine from a donkey’s unhappiness and in Guatemala learned that wearing weasel’s testicles as a necklace is more of a superstition than a contraceptive. He is fluent in Armenian, Cherokee, and Gibberish, and can read Latin, though he does not know what any of the words mean. He may or may not work for MI6 and can run really, really fast. He is a qualified mahout. He is very happily banned from France. He has not ever lost at paper-scissors-rock. And despite his own frequent assertions he is neither Mel Gibson’s son nor Hugh Jackman’s nephew. He currently divides his year between London, Italy and Vietnam. Exquisite Hours is his second novel.