Brian Bilston: The Diary of a Somebody (April 2026)

Brian Bilston (not his real name) is a poet who found fame on social media, “The Poet Laureate of Twitter”, and this, his first novel, is a comedy with poetry. The premise is that Brian, a forty-five year old divorced father of teenage Dylan and cat owner makes a New Year’s Resolution to write a poem a day. The reader follows a year in his life and becomes acquainted with his friends, neighbours and family.

Brian is a misfit, though he does have a job at first, and, like Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody, his life is a series of scrapes. Some of us have known self-destructable people like this and found him to be believable.

He procrastinates, gets into debt by squandering money and can’t seem to help letting down his friends, including his potential new girlfriend, Liz.

There are memorable characters in the book: his wildly eccentric occult following neighbour, the small group of fellow poets who meet in the pub and Tomas, the philosopher-janitor who has an apposite quote from Wittgenstein to offer Brian comfort and support for every difficulty.

Brian’s ex-wife has a new partner, a seemingly perfect, financially well-off motivational speaker who tirelessly raises money for various charities.

This is bad enough but his real nemesis is Toby Salt, one of the poetry group. He writes in a pretentious and inaccessible style, rejoicing in his, to his mind, superiority to the others and is scathing about their work.

When he is published and achieves critical acclaim he becomes even more insufferable.

Toby disappears and Brian is the chief suspect in, possibly, his murder. The police officers conducting the investigation remove Brian’s journal which contains hate-filled verse about Toby and torn out pages that Brian cannot explain.

The policemen make a great comic double-act with one of them offering critiques of Brian’s work and asking, in all seriousness why, if Brian calls himself a poet, he hasn’t written any limericks.

It falls upon Brian to investigate to prove his innocence.

He bonds with Dylan during a wet week on holiday in a Welsh cottage and their relationship was one of the highlights of the story.

Most of us liked his poems very much, appreciating the eclectic mix of styles with pastiches of well-known much-loved work combined with songs given new words and we especially enjoyed the horoscope haikus.

Some of us thought that the plot was a bit thin but there was, after all, a missing, presumed dead, poet, a dreadful betrayal of friends that required redemption, a very satisfying comeuppance and a happy resolution to a relationship that seemed to be doomed.

There was satire and word-play, laugh out loud moments and one particularly poignant poem that we thought was the author’s own and not another affectionate parody.

It was good to have a comic novel for a change and we were split down the middle with half giving it 4/5 but it was awarded 3/5 with some of the group saying that they would like to read more of Brian Bilston’s poetry.