Runner

by Scarlett Thomas

Genres: Literary Fiction; Amateur Sleuth; Suspense

Synopsis

He’s running for his life. And he’s running out of time.

Jay has been hunted since he was twenty years old. A contract on his life has been traded like a commodity, rising and falling with Bitcoin for decades. On the run once again with no passport and airmiles as his only currency, Jay will have to choose between love and survival, and run for his life.

While staying at an all-inclusive resort, surviving off of the points he accrued in a previous, more successful life, Jay meets Ellie, a beguiling fellow runner who may even be faster than he is, and is harboring secrets of her own. When an assassin appears poolside, Jay is on the run again, but this time with Ellie, as they find themselves on a catamaran helmed by a sinister and reckless crew.

The Runner is about high-finance, con artists, the Book of Jonah, ultramarathons, and how falling in love can change everything. Darkly funny, sexy, and exciting, Scarlett Thomas—author of the “work of gonzo genius” (The New York Times), The Sleepwalkers—readers from the sun-drenched roads of Cyprus to the rain slicked streets of Kent in this high-concept literary thriller.

Release date: November 3, 2026

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 256

Sample

1. Rocket ROCKET
Cyprus

May 2025

The catamaran glows bright white in the harbour, the colour of a freshly laundered alb. Water sloshes up its sides as if angling to be turned into wine. The words ‘Wet Jerusalem’ are stencilled on the side in the liturgical purple that specifically symbolises penitence, sacrifice and royalty.

Jay doesn’t notice any of that, because he is running.

Pat, pat, pat. As fast as he can. Which is not fast. Not now.

He gambols along doing the embarrassing jog-sprint of a man who has lost his fitness, perhaps due to injury, heartbreak, loss, obsession or just plain laziness, but still has to run from something. He must be doing a nine-minute mile like some pathetic salaryman. How has it come to this? He’s gone soft. Thirty-four years old, almost, and he’s past it.

A tall, slender man stands on the deck of the catamaran. He has long dark hair, a broad chest and a straggly goatee beard. He is barefoot and wearing dark, churchy robes. He appears to be wiping something wet off his face.

Jay looks behind him. Did he give the dreadlocked guy the slip? Possibly. Instead of running past the ceramics shop, Jay ducked into it and charged out the back where he improbably managed to scale a brick wall and leg it down to the harbour.

A larger man appears on deck. He is holding a hot dog in a white roll.

‘A runner,’ he says to the other guy. Then, ‘Cheer up, mate, for fuck’s sake.’

Does it look like Jay’s a runner, doubled over in numb agony, hands on his knees, panting like the hunted beast he is, with the sea now sloshing like a bucket of vomit beside him? Does he look like a runner, in his khaki shorts, Breton T-shirt and brown Gucci deck shoes?

‘They’ll catch you if you stop. Eh, Rafe?’

The tearful man in robes says nothing.

The other man bites into the roll and ketchup splashes on his bare hairy chest.

‘Looks like a geezer in some sort of trouble.’

Rafe stares at Jay. He says nothing.

‘What kinda trouble you in, man? Rafe, what kind of trouble you think he’s in?’ The hot-dog man nudges Rafe and more ketchup spills onto his chest hair.

Rafe’s like the non-speaking part of a double act. A ventriloquist’s dummy just missing a hand up his arse.

‘It’ll be woman trouble,’ says the man, fingering the ketchup in his chest hair. He looks at Jay. ‘I’m Sandy. And you are…?’

‘Jay,’ says Jay.

Sandy has a Glaswegian accent.

‘Are you British?’ Jay says. ‘Are you going back?’

He looks behind him, just once. He cannot be caught, because if he gets caught he will be killed.

‘Need to escape in a hurry?’ Sandy laughs. ‘We’re going to Cyprus,’ he adds, licking ketchup from his fingers. ‘For Jimmy’s Killer Prawns. A quick job, possibly, then home. Know any good liturgy? Or funny jokes? Ever performed an exorcism under pressure?’

Jay straightens. Checks behind him one more time. This island is impossibly small. Now the assassin knows he is here, he is dead unless he can leave in the next three minutes.

‘We need more crew,’ says Sandy. ‘You’ll have noticed that our priest is having a nervous breakdown.’

Jay approaches as Sandy tightens a rope that brings the catamaran close enough to the jetty that Jay can step onto it.

‘All aboard,’ says Sandy. ‘Ding ding ding.’

‘You really going back to the UK?’ asks Jay.

Sandy looks Jay up and down.

‘You murdered anyone?’

‘No.’

‘What you running from?’

‘My wife.’

‘Are you lying?’

‘No.’

‘Where’s your wedding ring?’

‘In the sea.’

‘Since when?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘Where’s all your stuff?’

‘I don’t have any stuff.’

‘Why not?’

‘My wife wouldn’t let me take anything.’

‘Why not?’

Jay just shrugs.

‘So you gonna do a runner, with nothing?’

‘I’m a minimalist. I’ve got everything I need in my pockets.’

Rafe looks up, his eyes red. ‘Like the disciples.’

Sandy repeats: ‘Like the disciples.’ He laughs darkly.

The storm in Cyprus comes hard like a wet dream through the crazed sleep of MSG and bad wine. Oriental Night in the buffet was a new low. Jay has never holidayed in a resort like this; journey’s end for package tours with tin-can flights landing from Manchester and Liverpool and East Midlands and Germany and France and Poland. But it is a relief to be here. Jay has six days off while Rafe and Sandy complete their exorcism and do other things off a list on a bit of paper in Sandy’s pocket. Six days where he no longer has to clear away communion wine bottles and change ice buckets and mop things up. No more disposing of bits of flipchart with mind-maps featuring obscure liturgy alongside estimates of what someone might pay to see a naked picture of a nun.

Jimmy’s Killer Prawns turned out to be real: a large bright establishment on the dreary road from Paphos to Kissonerga, its emblazoned frontage shining amid cheap tavernas, kebab shops, pubs advertising British football matches and a Lidl. Jay passed it on the bus to the all-inclusive resort he’d booked with a small fraction of the air miles he’d recovered on the apps he downloaded on the cheap Turkish phone he’d bought in the harbour.

Of course, everyone thinks their air miles might be useful one day, which is why they jump through hoops for them. Loyalty points: such a strange, vague, liminal currency, with their quantum exchange rates and microvalues. So tax-free and gamey. Probably untraceable, in the sense that no one would ever think to trace them. For most people, utterly useless. A long, complicated con. But for those on the run, there is potential.

If you do obsessively collect them then you understand you can pay for all sorts of things with just points. Boxes of wine, jewellery, gifts, travel. Probably of no use in the zombie apocalypse. But in the freewheeling chaos of late capitalism, if you have a lot of points you can, in theory at least, skim around quite untraced. This is why people hack them and flip them. Of course there are T&Cs and you have to book your reward flights years in advance. But still. It’s a lot of free stuff.

Jay currently holds a million Hilton Honors points and just under ten million air miles of different sorts – Avios, KrisFlyer and so on. All convertible into things like expensive leather goods and fountain pens of course, but also of use to book travel in all sorts of surprising places. Enough to go around the world, business class, more than six times, if only he had his passport.

You can spot other collectors, if you know where to look – usually in the business-class queue at the airport. All the money-heads and coked-up start-up guys in distressed Golden Goose sneakers and Rag & Bone jeans with identical hoodies designed by the same VC-backed monks, dragging battered Rimowa carry-ons and clutching their MacBook Airs like comfort blankets and dreaming of digital nomadery. The BA Club Europe section now snakes back nine, ten rows, because they’re all at it. Churning cards, stacking tier points, burner AmExes mailed to co-working spaces in Dubai or Cape Town. Gaming airline alliances like it’s 1998 and the coins might unlock a hidden level awash with free cheeseburgers and dancing girls.

Jay has AmEx Membership Rewards totalling around £3,000, and it is with £500-worth of these that he has booked this hotel room in an establishment with no Michelin stars, no reviews in Telegraph Travel or Condé Nast. Does that make it safe? Possibly the safest place in the world right now is the island he ran away from. Except they know that too.

The wind pounds the French doors, hurls itself around the stone patio. Jay is not sure if he is dreaming. Whatever he ate at dinner has made him hyper-aware of everything around him. The hum of the mini-fridge; the sudden early-hours spurt of the tarnished rain shower. Real rain showers that blast the windows before dawn. The menacing slap of wet footsteps in the corridor. But they have not yet come for him.

After breakfast Jay lies shirtless on a damp lounger on the adults-only sundeck and is conspicuous as a man alone in this weather. People come and then go, talking about storms. Jay has no swimwear, only the shorts he’s been crewing in for the last week.

There are swimming trunks in the mini-market, and bottles of wine, and cheap paperback novels, but Jay cannot go to the mini-market because you have to pay in real currency there. All he has are the four euro remaining from his first week’s crewing pay after buying the phone, a toothbrush, toothpaste and a razor. There is shampoo and conditioner in the rooms. You can shave with a mixture of shampoo and conditioner if you are desperate, which Jay is. Why do hotel rooms not have deodorant? Why sewing kits and shower caps and body cream but never deodorant? You need cash to buy deodorant in places like this.

You need cash, or at least real currency, for so many things.

Clothes. Travel by anything except plane. Somewhere to live that is not a hotel room. Not that there’s anything wrong with living in hotel rooms, but Jay doesn’t have enough points to last anywhere decent for long.

Meanwhile, he can choose to do fifty press-ups each morning. On the first day, he manages ten. But on the second day, twenty.

He chooses one hundred and fifty sit-ups and manages twenty-five, then forty-five.

Jay lies quietly by the adults-only pool as the sun comes out and warms him. When will he get back to the UK? Will his emergency cash still be there, in the roof of the shed of his first childhood home? Ha. Not even worth checking. Didn’t he have some meme coins on a dodgy exchange somewhere? But they’ll know all about that too. How can he go from the four euro he has now to a million, or even just a few hundred? How can he go from a cheap hotel to an actual flat? It would be impossible without knowing the people he used to know. He may as well bet on horses. But maybe a safe fund for a long time? Tech, despite all the noise about AI and Nvidia and the Taiwanese factories where they make the chips. Bonds, for if the bull market keeps buckerooing in reaction to the US government’s new tariffs. Japan, perhaps.

Time in the market rather than timing the market.

Like Warren Buffett and all those old bros.

But how long has he really got?

And how will he get the funds to begin?

Jay lies on the sunbed watching swallows dip in the air and sip water from the swimming pool. They look so graceful in flight that it’s easy to miss the desperate way they clutch at the sky. What does all that chlorine do to them? Down the road, bananas swell out of trees like hopeful erections. Lizards scuttle across paths and up walls and have fierce sex in the sunshine.

Jay tries not to think about the life he ran out on.

At least he was single this time. A pathetic man with a Walden fantasy, on holiday in Greece by himself, sending client emails from his single lounger by the pool. Reading Martin Amis over dinner, his book propped open with the salt and pepper jars. The wife was a lie. The wife left him long ago.

Is she even still alive? He has no idea.

He should never have left London. It’s easier to be lost in London.

He has no idea how the assassin found him this time.

After Jay has been on the sunbed for two hours he repairs to the stone terrace where he drinks all-inclusive mountain tea. It is pale yellow and tastes of flowers he has never seen. Nearby on the terrace are a British couple. Many people here are wearing their best holiday clothes, but not these two. They wear un-ironed loose garments in linen and cotton, and sunhats that look like they’ve been through the wash a few hundred times. They no doubt read the Guardian and grow their own tomatoes. There is not a price on their heads and so they can live as they wish. They appear to be watching a German family: a mother and father with three teenage daughters. The German family have put their five sunbeds in a row, with the mummy and daddy sunbeds pushed together like a double bed. They all face the main pool, the one children are allowed in.

‘What kind of daughter walks past three female family members in order to have her bikini top done up by her hot dad?’ wonders the British woman.

‘It’s curious,’ says the man.

‘And the way he got them to play tennis with him yesterday, one after the other.’

‘But not the middle one.’

‘No. Just the voluptuous redhead and the icy blonde.’

‘They really did do that, like the changing of the guards.’

‘In their sexy tennis outfits. To play with their dad.’

‘I didn’t realise there were three of them.’

‘Yeah, I was focused on how much the icy blonde hates the voluptuous redhead.’

‘She does, doesn’t she?’

‘And the hot dad loves the redhead more, even though he’s so severe and she’s clearly a little too fat.’

‘Is he severe?’

‘Look at those calf muscles. And the icy-blonde wife. She assumes he doesn’t want honey highlights. But he has a soft spot for the redhead. She represents that part of himself he’s not fully in touch with.’

‘Is that cellulite already?’

‘What I don’t get,’ said the woman, sipping her sparkling water, ‘is what the family must be like behind closed doors. What does the dad say and do to have become such a focus? What would a family dinner be like? I can’t visualise it.’

‘Maybe it’s not the dad at all. Maybe it’s just that the sisters are competitive and he’s randomly the object for it.’

From the bar comes the heavy bass of a desperate pop star singing about her tragic love for the man who has dumped her.

After lunch, Jay washes his clothes in bright yellow hotel shampoo and leaves them to dry on the white plastic chairs on the stone patio. Naked, he does twenty more press-ups and logs them on his tiny Turkish phone, ignoring the crack on the screen that made it so cheap. He can’t leave his room until his clothes are dry, and his room is west-facing so it takes a while. To pass the time he draws graphs on hotel notepaper.

Table 25 is the best one. It is by the window with sweeping views over Sunset Bay. The view is not obscured by posts and joists. On his third night Jay is joined by a woman. At first he wants to say that the other seat is taken, but he already knows she is quiet. She spent most of the day on the sunbed adjacent to his, sunning herself, occasionally topless, which made him at first assume she was French. Her breasts are perfect, but she has a tattoo of a dripping pizza on one upper arm and a yin & yang sign on the other. She now wears an almost threadbare tie-dyed vest with a picture of the Indian elephant god Ganesh on it. She looks somewhat familiar, but Jay’s not sure from where. Perhaps he’s seen her on TV? She has that kind of jawline.

‘This seat isn’t taken?’ she says now, in English, with a London accent and the syntax of the frequent traveller.

Jay shakes his head and goes back to his sliced pork and salad.

The woman gets salad, with a small bowl of Greek yogurt. She has found sliced avocados somewhere, and hard-boiled eggs. She seems to have put about ten boiled eggs in a separate bowl, maybe for later.

‘I’m Ellie,’ she says. ‘Hi.’

Her teeth are inexplicably bad. Who has bad teeth these days when veneers only cost a few grand?

‘Jay,’ says Jay. The last time he told anyone his real name was in 2011.

‘What’s this stuff, do you know?’

Ellie is holding up a forkful of greenery. It’s like particularly dark lettuce, but with smaller leaves.

He shakes his head and shrugs.

‘It’s quite spicy. Like that thing you get in sandwiches at M&S sometimes?’

‘Rocket?’ suggests Jay. ‘Cypriot rocket?’

With clothes on and her mouth shut Ellie looks like a supermodel, with her slim waist and long blonde hair. Could the hair maybe do with a wash? She wears high-waisted denim shorts. Her legs are so long.

She sits down and starts scribbling something on a piece of paper. It looks like a hotel bill or receipt. She’s using the blank spaces to write on. Jay is reminded of a cleaner he’ll never see again who would write notes in this way for Jay and his ex-wife, as if paper cost ten pounds a sheet. Cloffs. Bleech.

Jay tries not to look at what Ellie’s writing. Or at least, he pretends to try not to look.

He sees two columns, distributed haphazardly over the paper.

Pros & Cons.

She finishes her meal, wishes him goodnight and drifts off before he gets a chance to see much else.

The following night, Ellie is already at Table 25 when Jay arrives. He goes to the salad bar and collects some of the green stuff. He tries a tiny amount while he’s waiting for the sliced roast turkey. It is nice. It is peppery. It doesn’t look like rocket. He asks the Greek chef, who confirms it is in fact rocket.

He takes this info back to Table 25.

‘I’d quite like to grow it,’ says Ellie. ‘In a garden. I mean you wouldn’t be able to buy it in a supermarket, would you? I’ve literally never seen it before.’

‘Do you have one?’

‘What?’

‘A garden.’

She laughs sadly. ‘No. I used to, but…’ She trails off.

‘Where are you from?’

‘London. You?’

‘Same. Well, now. I’m from Canterbury originally.’

Why on earth has he just told her the truth?

She puts her pencil in her mouth and sucks it for a moment or two. Then she points it at Jay. ‘Why are you here alone in the same clothes you wore yesterday?’

He forces himself to smile.

‘I’m a misanthropic minimalist. You?’

She looks confused, like she doesn’t understand these words.

‘Why are you really here?’

How is it possible that Jay has not prepped a good answer to this question?

‘Why “pros and cons”?’ he asks instead of answering her.

Ellie raises an eyebrow.

‘You been peeking at my notes?’

‘Sorry.’

Ellie bites her lip. ‘Trying to work out whether to leave a toxic relationship.’

‘Husband?’

She shakes her head.

‘Boyfriend?’

‘Stepbrother. Feel like if I’m describing the relationship as toxic, then that means—’

‘But if it’s your own brother…’

‘Stepbrother.’ She sighs. ‘It’s complicated. You?’

The lie appears suddenly, proleptically. ‘I’m in training.’

She smiles. ‘For what, a sunbathing competition?’

‘A race.’

‘Like a running race? I haven’t seen you running.’

‘I go on the cliffs.’

‘Yeah, I walk on the cliffs.’

‘I go at dawn,’ he says. ‘Like the Kenyans.’

‘What Kenyans?’

‘All the greatest runners of the last twenty years. Well, more or less. Kenenisa Bekele is actually Ethiopian.’

Ellie looks at Jay’s wrist. ‘That what made your tan lines? A running watch?’

‘Yeah.’

Jay’s beloved Garmin, left behind in the same room as his phone, wallet and all his other possessions, back in Greece. Recently he’d just used it to find out how tired and fucked up he actually is, but in a previous version of himself, when he could still run and do manly things, he used to train with it. Back then, running felt almost like flying: being in the zone or the flow, where your body troubles you not and nothing hurts or will ever hurt again. And then sitting on the back step at home with a tumbler of mineral water and a handful of strawberries and looking at his stats on Strava. How much fitter he was than the day before. How much better. And his ex-girlfriend, the one before his ex-wife, the one who used to dress in black stockings and red lipstick and dance to Duran Duran videos for him, laughing and suggesting he live in the moment rather than the spreadsheet.

Lately Jay has only run for taxis, or business-class flights. If only his parents could have seen him, in his most recent life, when he didn’t have to break a sweat for anything. But he hasn’t seen his parents for fifteen years.

‘I might do the fun run,’ says Ellie. ‘It’ll be too easy for you, I expect.’

‘What fun run?’

‘On Saturday? Before the fireworks.’

‘What fireworks?’

‘For the cultural festival? It’s only 5k, I think? Like a parkrun. I might enter just for the chance to do some exercise.’

‘Can’t you just—’

‘I can’t run on my own,’ she says. ‘I’m like a greyhound. I need to chase something.’ She laughs. ‘I need something to be running away from me.’

She pushes her breasts out, makes a face, and then something clicks in her back.

‘That’s better,’ she says, flexing once again.

Jay winces at the sound of her bones cracking.

‘Hypermobile,’ she explains, with a little grin. ‘Double-jointed. You should see some of the positions I get into.’

She pushes her breasts out again but this time nothing clicks. She stays like that, still grinning. Raises an eyebrow.

Oh fuck. What is this now? This has swerved like a terrible late-night driver whose exit looms into view while they are still in the fast lane.

Her grin reminds Jay of—

Never mind. She’s leaning forward to reach the salt – why now, so far through her meal? – and Jay can see her pale breasts quivering like two panna cottas beneath her thin vest top. In his mind he is celibate, so very, very celibate. He hasn’t done it for such a long time. Can he still?

He doesn’t even have deodorant.

‘Um,’ Jay says. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to…’

He pats himself down.

‘The winner gets a hundred euro, I think,’ says Ellie.

‘I’ve got a, sorry, a call with the US, and…’

His chair scrapes noisily back and he flees. Past the white tablecloths and the dinner outfits and the lingering smell of Piz Buin. The English couple are by the window a few tables back, still watching the Germans, the woman with her half-smile and the man doting on her like a proper husband. Jay hurries past them. He can’t go to his room – he needs air, air, air – so he leaves the resort complex and jogs to where the path to the cliffs begins.

He would like this moment to be serene and calm, with a breeze whispering through palm trees while he quiets his mind, but in fact ’90s hits are blaring from the beach bar by the rocks. Fine. OK. If Jay was going to run – say in the fun run – how would he do it? He has no running shoes, and no way of getting any. His favourite-ever running book was about the benefits of going barefoot, like the Tarahumara tribe. The primal nutrition brigade are still always going on about the barefoot thing. How our ancestors would run for days to get meat without any help from Nike or Adidas. Though if he ran barefoot Jay would probably just look stupid and hurt himself.

But if he had a hundred euro, he could… What? Buy deodorant? A bus ticket to somewhere else? For a moment it’s as if Jay is an entity like a swallow or a lizard and the entity that he is does not need money because it would never need to buy anything because it has all it needs in its environment.

But if he was going to fuck Ellie—

No, no, no, no, no.

Like one lizard climbing aboard another—

No.

There’s an outdoor gym on a patch of grass near the hotels at the top of the cliff. Bit of a stupid concept, because there are no weights and therefore no resistance. The equipment, if you can even call it that, is solid metal welded into the shape of familiar gym machines: a chest press, a lateral pull-down. How are you supposed to use them? With just body weight? Never mind. Jay takes off his deck shoes. He has no socks – no socks even! But man does not need socks to chase down antelope. Jay takes off his Breton T-shirt, folds it and puts it by his shoes. His shorts are the wrong length for this, but they will have to do.

A hundred euro. It’s true. He saw a poster on his way out.

Could he go all-in somehow with the four euro he has?

If he invested four euro and made a hundred, that would be a return of 2,400 per cent. He’d have conjured an unbelievable profit of ninety-six euro. But how would he do it? Where to put the outlay? He’d really need a vest and shorts and socks and trainers, at minimum. But if the barefoot thing worked that could be so much simpler. Or maybe not, as he’d look like a knob and everyone would ask stupid questions. He could run bare-chested, but that would be worse.

If only he had real running shorts. Perhaps they sell such garments in the mini-market? But he doesn’t have enough cash to buy them.

Jay remembers an anecdote from the beginning of an Arthur Lydiard book he began but never finished, which resulted in an entire men’s running team buying women’s underwear to train in, not as a joke, but for a serious reason he now can’t recall.

He sets off, downhill, a hotel on his left and a sheer drop on his right. There are lights everywhere, shapes of people in their rooms cleaning their teeth or getting undressed. This is not the wilds of Kenya, and the altitude is not all that. Jay is a natural forefoot runner and the first few steps he takes in his bare feet are light and effortless. Then he lands on a sharp stone. One of the books he read about barefoot running suggested that this couldn’t happen because of some chimpish encoded brain magic that means you see stones and sharp objects before you are conscious of it.

‘Ow,’ says Jay, into the chemically lit darkness.

The pain takes a few seconds to be replaced with numbness. Amazing how the body does that. If only Jay could roll himself in little stones and stop feeling anything at all. But running can do that too.

Pat, pat, pat.

That familiar old sound.

Jay wants to feel light, but he feels so heavy. He senses his stomach jiggling like a beer gut. It can’t be that bad, surely?

Was it a mistake to begin downhill? But there isn’t much choice, from the top of a cliff. You should ideally always begin running uphill or into the wind. You come back the easy way. You earn the good stuff by doing the hard stuff first. Other millennials don’t necessarily agree with this; they believe their entire lives should be a continual downhill slope, and the wind should always be behind them, velocity with no effort, as if their existence has been nudged onto a travelator.

The one time Jay ran on a travelator – on a work trip with a colleague who famously believed that anyone who has never missed a plane spends too much time in airports – it was most excellent. Surely how you’d feel if you were the first person ever nailing a sub-two. Like weighing almost nothing, plus wings: real ones with feathers.

Going downhill is harder with trainers on, because your toes hit the front of your shoe, even if you do buy them a size and a half bigger than normal footwear. Jay does not have this problem right now, but he feels a kind of drag on the balls of his feet, almost a ripping of his skin. He can’t have that if he’s entering a race. But he can’t enter the race, not really. It would be impossible.

At the bottom of the hill is a concrete platform where a woman is doing yoga in the dark while