EBOOK

Licensed Premises

Neil Campbell
(0)
Year
2022
Language
English

About

Nobody believes what they see on TV, so they want to look for something else, an alternate reality, or a conspiracy theory, and it's interesting to explore it, Twitter is fucking full of it, especially now. It's no wonder people round here are into it, but you don't have to read all that shit, just have some mushrooms and wander round Lidl off your tits.'
In these fourteen northern tales, Campbell takes us from the edgelands of Manchester to the cloistered villages of The Peak District, Northumberland and Scotland, and illuminates the lives of outsiders, misfits, loners and malcontents with an eye for the darkly comic. A wild-eyed man disturbs the banter in a genial bookshop. A fraught woman seeks to flee a collapsing reservoir. A failed academic finds solace in a crime writer's favourite pub. A transit van killer stalks a railway footpath. A poet accused of plagiarism finds his life falling apart.

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Reviews

"(on previous work) Campbell's narrator is a young working-class man from Manchester. Throughout the novel he works a number of zero hours jobs, first at a mail-sorting depot, later at a number of libraries. There is nearly always something to dishearten our man, be it his duties, colleagues, managers, or just the constant uncertainty that comes with this kind of employment. Besides work, the narrator has a number of unsuccessful attempts at relationships, and sees the face of his city change, losing its character to gentrification. There's a stop-start feel to reading the novel itself: as with zero hours work, the present moment is all, and even the immediate future uncertain."
David's Book World

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