Published: 2006.
Setting: Brighton & Hove.
First Line: Once, after driving my taxi for eight hours non-stop, in heavy city traffic, I saw a cat having death throes in the road ahead of me.

Stephen Bardot is both jobless and depressed and it is suggested to him that he tries taxi driving while deciding what to do with his life. Thus begins his recounting of the varied experiences he has on the nightshift. Coupled with this is story of how he becomes involved with various characters from a parallel world; from which the book gets its title. He puts himself increasingly at risk as the boundaries between the worlds become progressively blurred and his control over his own reality is threatened by the inhabitants of ‘Thirteen’.
As I chose to read this because it is set in the city in which I live I was not disappointed. The continual name dropping of roads on which his fares took him was great as it allowed me to picture exactly where in the city Bardot was working. For me the strength of the book lies with the fact that Beaumont based the taxi incidents on his own experiences whilst working as a taxi driver in Brighton & Hove. This results in these sections of the book reading as more of a ‘real lives’ insight into the world of a taxi driver rather than a novel.
I feel that the taxi-incidents and the parallel world parts of the novel do not gel together well enough and, for me, would have been better as two different stories. Over-all I enjoyed Thirteenand would recommend it to anyone who liked What Was Lost as they are both books in which the authors own experience of the realities of the careers of the main protagonists (retail in the case of What Was Lost) make for a more authentic read. ( )

Stephen Bardot is depressed after the failure of his business, and agrees to become a night-time taxi driver for a year. He finds that becoming nocturnal leads to a strange state of mind due to complete exhaustion where nothing is quite what it seems.

When he discovers that a house, 13 Wish Road, where he's had a regular pick-up doesn't exist, he begins to become obsessed and tries to get back into the zone where it was real. The Nurse tells him, 'Thirteen is not a number, it's a state of mind'. This leads to many strange experiences including meeting the girls of his dreams, but then he starts to ask questions about Thirteen, and just when as he's starting to come out of his depression, the events in the zone get very bad indeed ...

Based on real experience of driving taxis and drawing from the author's work as a psychotherapist, this is a many layered novel. Unlike many other novels which include experiences in altered states, this one is so skilfully written, you really believe in the dreamworld - it starts off so ordinarily as if it were part of normal life, that by the time you find out about it, you've been engaged with it for some time; when things get weirder you're then drawn with it.

Finally, you are left to make up your mind over what ultimately happens to Stephen, but the lack of a definite ending doesn't jar, just keeps you thinking about what a good book it was. ( )