WHEN CREATIVITY BECOMES A BRAND

It’s about a man who got everything he wanted — and then had to live with it.

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Alchemy of the Imperfectionists is a darkly comic literary satire about ambition, burnout, and what happens when your identity becomes your product. Set partly in Edinburgh, it follows a celebrated art–tech founder returning home for a reckoning with friendship, success, and the self he turned into a brand. It explores creativity as currency, identity as performance, and the strange cost of modern success.

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The novel follows Argyle Mackintosh, a celebrated art–tech founder who returns to rain-slicked Edinburgh burned out by success and haunted by the suspicion that the genius the world applauded may never have existed at all. Drawn back into the orbit of his former chosen family at The Nude Male — a half-mythic café populated by misfits, rivals, and truth-tellers — Argyle is forced into a reckoning with the friendships, compromises, and selves he left behind.

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Blending biting satire with lyrical introspection, Alchemy of the Imperfectionists examines creativity as performance, success as spectacle, and imperfection as something increasingly engineered out of modern life. Wickedly funny and quietly devastating, it is a novel about the violence of friendship, the seduction of ambition, and the strange, almost holy relief of becoming real.

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A satire of creativity as currency and identity as performance.