Meet Oliver Tate, 15. Convinced that his father is depressed ("Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner") and his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher, "a hippy-looking twonk", he embarks on a hilariously misguided campaign to bring the family back together. Meanwhile, he is also trying to lose his virginity - before he turns sixteeen - to his pyromaniac girlfriend Jordana. Will Oliver succeed in either aim? Submerge yourself in Submarine and find out...

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'A brilliant first novel by a young man of ferocious comic talent'
The Times

'Transplants The Catcher in the Rye to south Wales . . . Dunthorne can make you laugh like you did during double physics on a wet Wednesday afternoon'
Observer

'Dunthorne captures the mores of Britain today better than novelists twice his age. He is sure to write books that declare more than their vocabulary'
New Statesman

It is Sunday morning. I hear our dial-up modem playing bad jazz as my mother connects to the internet. I am in the bathroom.

I recently discovered that my mother has been typing the names of as-yet-uninvented mental conditions into Yahoo’s search engine: ‘delusion syndrome teenage’, ‘over-active imagination problem’, ‘holistic behavioural stabilizers’.

When you type ‘delusion syndrome teenage’ into Yahoo, the first page it offers you is to do with Cotard’s Syndrome. Cotard’s Syndrome is a branch of autism where people believe they are dead. The website features some choice quotes from victims of the disease. For a while I was slipping these phrases into lulls in conversation at dinnertime or when my mother asked about my day at school.

‘My body has been replaced by a shell.’

‘My internal organs are made of stone.’

‘I have been dead for years.’

I have stopped saying these things. The more I pretended to be a corpse, the less open she became about issues of mental health. I used to write questionnaires for my parents. I wanted to get to know them better. I asked things like:

What hereditary illnesses am I likely to inherit?

What money and land am I likely to inherit?

If your child was adopted, at what age would you choose to tell him about his real mother?

a) 4-8

b) 9-14

c) 15-18

I am nearly fifteen.

They looked over the questionnaires but they never answered them.

Since then, I have been using covert analysis to discover my parents’ secrets.

One of the things I have discovered is that, although my father’s beard looks ginger from a distance, when you get up close it is in fact a subtle blend of black, blond and strawberry.

I have also learnt that my parents have not had sex in two months. I monitor their intimacy via the dimmer switch in their bedroom. I know when they have been at it because the next morning the dial will still be set to halfway.

I also discovered that my father suffers from bouts of depression: I found an empty bottle of tricyclic antidepressants that were in the wicker bin under his bedside table. I still have the bottle among my old Transformers. Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner.

It takes all of my intuition to find out when a bout of my father’s depression has started. Here are two signals: one, I can hear him emptying the dishwasher from my attic room. Two, he presses so hard when he handwrites that it is possible, in a certain light, to see two or three days’ worth of notes indented in the surface of our plastic easy-clean tablecloth.

Gone to yoga,

lamb in fridge,

Ll

Gone to Sainsbury’s,

Ll

Please record Channel 4, 9pm,

Lloyd

My father does not watch TV, he just records things.

There are ways of detecting that a bout of depression has finished: if dad makes an elaborate play on words or does an impression of a gay or oriental person. These are good signs.

In order to plan ahead, it’s in my interest to know about my parents’ mental problems from the earliest age.

I have not established the correct word for my mother’s condition. She is lucky because her mental health problems can be mistaken for character traits: neighbourliness, charm and placidity.

I’ve learnt more about human nature from watching ITV’s weekday morning chat shows than she has in her whole life. I tell her: ‘You are unwilling to address the vacuum in your interpersonal experiences,’ but she does not listen.

There is some evidence that my mother’s job is to blame for her state of mental health. She works for the council’s legal and democratic services department. She has many colleagues. One of the rules in her office is that, if it is your birthday, you are held responsible for bringing your own cake to work.

All of which brings me back to the medicine cabinet.

I slide the mirrored door aside; my face cross-fades, replaced by black and white boxes for prescription creams, pills in blister packs and brown bottles plugged with cotton wool. There’s Imodium, Canesten, Piriton, Benylin, Robitussin, plus a few suspicious looking holistic treatments: arnica, echinacea, St John’s Wort and some dried-out leaves of aloe vera.

They believe that I have some emotional problems. I think that is why they do not want to burden me with their own. What they don’t seem to understand is that their problems are already my problems. I may inherit my mother’s weak tear ducts. If she walks into a breeze, the tears come out of the far corners of her eyes and run down towards her earlobes.

I have decided that the best way to get my parents to open up is to give them the impression that I am emotionally stable. I will tell them I am going to see a therapist and that he or she says that I am mostly fine except that I feel cut off from my parents, and that they ought to be more generous with their anecdotes.

There’s a clinic not far from my house that contains numerous types of therapist: physio-, psycho-, occupational. I weigh up which of the therapists will provide the least trouble. My body is pretty much perfect, so I plump for Dr Andrew Goddard B.Sc. M.Sc., a physiotherapist.

When I phone, a male secretary answers. I tell him that I need an early appointment with Andrew because I have to go to school. He says I can get an appointment for Thursday morning. He asks me if I’ve been to the clinic before. I say no. He asks me if I know where it is and I say yes, it is close to the swings.

I am amazed to discover that there are detective agencies in the Yellow Pages. Real detective agencies. One of them has this slogan: ‘You can run but you can’t hide’. I fold the corner of the page for easy reference.

A Valentine's Day Poem By Joe Dunthorne

Future Dating

Sat along rotating pine benches,

we wear scrolling badges that display:

Name; Favourite thing; Emotional state.

I am Joe; Money; Anxious

as Porcia; Old buildings; Extraordinary

swivels into view with art deco

cheekbones, sky-rise posture.

She speaks in intricate structures

with witty stucco asides

and is either marriage material

or a one-off demolition-snog

in a room full of Lego.

I give her green as she dioramas

into Karen; Knitting; Distracted:

her chopsticks clicking

as though making a scarf

from her udon noodles;

our three minutes pass in excruciating

knit one purl one chit chat.

She sucks up her tongue

and draws a frowning emoticon

in the air, before swishing away

as George; The Nineties; Superior

slides over, saying she likes my retro avatar

and it turns out we both still use Mozilla

“Keepin’ it old skool!”

– High five –

“LOL!”

then our three minutes are gone

and I’m thumping green

as Sylvia; Firearms; Impatient

appears: shotgun eyes, fingers twitching,

white gunk at the corners of her mouth.

I smell her feet from under the table:

fragrance of murderer’s glove

and I’m pressing red and red

as Kate; Imperfections; Unclear

pulls up with semi-translucent hair.

I compliment her body, her lips,

the infinite detail of her eyes

but she says she can take no credit.

Then she’s screaming, quietly,

that her battery’s about to die

as she starts to fizz like an unearthed plug.