It’s not only working in a converted church that makes Eric McFarlane feel like “a new kind of priest”. As a council-funded debt advisor in a decayed Cumbrian mining town during the mid-1990s, Eric ministers patiently to a straggling flock of desperate locals, hearing confessions of shopping addictions and unpaid debts that show him how far material values have replaced spiritual faith in his once largely Catholic community – and Eric himself is not above such concerns, his own debts to banks and loan sharks having spiralled out of control.

About to lose the home he shares with his sensible, self-employed girlfriend, Eric hatches a plot with his most hopeless client, the shopaholic Doreen, which will enable her to seek refuge from her troubles in bankruptcy, whilst bringing Eric the cash to appease his creditors.  Meanwhile, the arrival of a series of anonymous photos at Eric’s home, and an unexpected phone call from an old flame from his schooldays, lead him into an increasingly dangerous labyrinth of threats and deception.

Already admired as an author of short stories, David Gaffney here proves himself to be fully adaptable to a more extensive form. His crisp, colloquial prose frequently achieves a poetic economy of expression, as when he evokes the “white-bread good looks” of a young official receiver, or conveys a woman’s poverty through the detail of her going bare-legged in February. In more sustained threads of imagery, Gaffney draws upon animal evolution to expose the attitudes of the sub-prime loans market (“We are competing for food,” one agent explains) – while other, Freudian associations emerge through images such as the comparison of a wad of cash, dropped on the floor, to “a great steaming turd”.

The last of the novel’s four parts reveals the connections between its main narrative, and the two others that alternate with this (these being the first-person memories of the schoolboy Eric, and a suspenseful sequence involving the torture of a “grey-eyed man”). This skilful play of multiple narratives is one of various aspects that Never Never shares with such Victorian forerunners as Dickens’s Bleak House – a somewhat less worthily old-fashioned touch being the gruesome disposal of one of its most anti-materialist female characters. Although apparently intended to represent a tragic martyrdom to a depression-inducing debt culture, the baroque unpleasantness of this perpetuates a long-standing literary tradition of typically male-authored, violent treatments of non-conforming women – coming also as the climax to this otherwise plausible novel’s most incongruously far-fetched plot strand. On the whole, however, and like its Tindal Street stablemate Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost, Never Never successfully distils a nineteenth-century spirit of combined social awareness, eye for detail, and flair for storytelling into a compact, intelligently entertaining, and highly pertinent tale for our times.

 

For more information, visit:

http://www.tindalstreet.co.uk/

Bristol-based publisher Tindal Street Press is currently riding high with Girl a Blue Dress. It was long listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize award, and has been garnering very positive press. The author, Gaynor Arnold, must also be ecstatic; especially considering this is her debut novel.

Inspired by the relationship between Charles Dickens and his wife, Girl in a Blue Dress follows Dorothea, the wife of a famous (fictional) nineteenth century novelist, Alfred Gibson. Initially seduced by his copious attention lavished upon her, she soon discovers, at the very least, that she’ll always play second fiddle to his work, and sometimes be a minor bit player in his life. It’s a life that includes all kinds of additional obsessions, some of them quite upsetting.

The tale begins after Alfred’s funeral, with Dorothea musing alone in her room about her time with her husband. Although the narrative exists mostly in flashback, the book is punctuated with these interludes from Dorothea’s present. It’s a downbeat device, and it’s one that does unwittingly suggest that she is more defined by her husband than she is aware. Essentially the book attempts to be a tale of self-empowerment, of  a woman defining her identity aside from the identity that her friends, the media and the general public are giving her; that of a celebrity’s wife. However Arnold never quite finds the balance between bittersweet optimism and murky misanthropy, and the book eventually is a hopeless tale of suppressed femininity.

That said, it’s an involving read, and Arnold has a talent for weaving disparate threads of narrative together. Her characters are mostly well-drawn and her prose immensely readable. The book does occasionally stagnate as Dorothea gets more self-involved and blind to her situation; Arnold does not quite have the skill yet to craft a narrator in which we can clearly see elements of unreliability. However the amount of period detail and psychological richness within every section of the novel keeps it more than engaging throughout its four hundred pages.

A tale of biting one’s tongue until it draws blood, Girl in a Blue Dress is a melancholy read, but one that reminds us that behind great men were, more often than not, great women to support them.

 

For more information, visit:

http://www.tindalstreet.co.uk/

Selima Hill’s ‘The Hat’ tends to favour short, sharp bursts of sculpted streams of consciousness. She presents a condensed verse that is brimming with insight, information and interpretation. This comes across as beguiling, and could infuriate some readers who could mistakenly dismiss it as glib and facetious. However, for those who read closer, the technique provides disquieting snapshots of the troubled speaker’s mind.
Read together, the poetry forms a narrative focusing on a woman struggling to regain her identity after a horrific injury. It is a tough, and potentially quite restricting, subject matter that Hill handles with earthy humour, a lightness of touch and many surprising observations. She has a gift in picking out unusual details and observing the most surprising things in situations of extreme horror, confusion and stress - a fresh and surprisingly accessible approach.
The collection rarely comes across as noticeably contrived; the sum of the verses’ parts adds up to more than just a plain narrative. Hill uses the events of her story to discuss ideas of femininity, loneliness and helplessness. Although most of the poems move the story on somehow, they each retain a mystery that is very much their own and which would remain unchanged if one of the pieces was anthologised.
Hill is not always entirely successful; at times the verses are wilfully obscure, at other points noticeably obvious. Hill never quite creates the perfect marriage of the literal and the metaphorical throughout. However, in a collection that combines the simmering anger of ‘How Sweet the Voices’ and ‘Semolina’, and the playfulness of ‘Gold Cup’ and ‘It Was the Size of a Pea’, these faults can be overlooked in light of Hill’s enigmatic and fascinating British poetic style.

For more information, visit http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/

With this first collection, Bloodaxe Books continue to champion new poetic voices of rare invention and diversity. Combining fragments of the personal with excursions into myth and historic reality, Batchelor’s debut is a truly polished collection. Skilfully evading the mundane, he never allows a string of references to suffocate purpose and image. Here, café bound romantic dissections rest easily alongside passages from Gilgamesh, while a heartfelt homage to tree-climbing neighbours poems which reference Blodeweudd and Artemis. Yet, there is no easy nostalgia on show, or dewy-eyed hankering for the old ways: a quiet, pastoral setting often evokes death and transformation to haunting effect.
While the shorter poems carry verses that sting and visuals that hover in memory (like the minstrel ‘whose voice/ was a jet of blood’), it is the longer pieces which bear the most lasting effect – Findings is a tender memorial to a fading relative, while the closing sequence repurposes Gaelic verse dating back to the 9th century. Another highlight, The Butcher’s Daughter, finds us in post-war Germany, where life and death play out through small observations and rough vernacular.
One of the highlights of Batchelor’s collection are his translations of Ovid’s Tristae, which plough fresh currents of longing from their classical origins, and nestle snugly among Bachelor’s own keening observations.

For more information, visit http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/

Philip Kotler, the world’s number four financial guru (according to the Financial Times) and the world’s foremost expert on the strategic practice of marketing (according to the Management Centre Europe) has collected the questions most frequently asked of him and ordered them, along with his expert answers in one, user friendly volume.
What is it called? FAQs on Marketing, Answered by the Guru of Marketing: Philip Kotler. I think it is safe to assume that there is a sly sense of humour behind this title.
This warmth pervades the book and is an attractive quality in what could easily have been cynical in nature. Kotler sums up the pre-occupations of his views on marketing in the final answer of the book: that a business has only two basic functions, marketing and innovation, and that marketing is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, i.e. from the customer’s point of view. Kotler’s holistic view of marketing encompasses marketing on a personal level, and he gives a particularly engaging analogy of a relationship:
“A major function of a market is to match buyers and sellers. Suppose a man identifies a woman to whom he is attracted. He will go into a “courtship” mode, which is a form of marketing … Good marketing is about setting up expectations and fulfilling them; otherwise you have an unhappy customer, and sooner or later the relationship ends.”
Kotler’s humanist approach to marketing is most welcome.
The book is highly practical by its very nature. Kotler’s advice is brief and evidence of effectiveness is always used; accompanying a piece of advice will be a situation in which it has been successfully employed and, more often than not, a company that has employed it. This unassuming rough guide works on the principle that brief answers will suffice in the first instance and that readers who are driven by curiosity will dig deeper into other texts that explore the issues further. In this book Kotler brings together both theory and practice. There are problems with this book, such as when topics are covered in multiple contexts and advice does sometimes lack consistency, but in the majority of cases this handbook’s comprehensive break down of topics will allow someone looking for initial guidance to pick it up and find a great ‘leaping off’ point for a journey into the fascinating world of marketing.

For more information visit http://www.cyanbooks.com/

Selima Hill’s new collection of poems Gloria is an anthology of over 300 pages, ranging from her 1984 collection Saying Hello at the Station right the way up to her 2006 book Red Roses, showing her progression as a poet.
Hill’s poetry is constantly surprising, using arresting imagery, mixing the flippant with the complex and psychological explorations into human emotion. Her subjects and images often return to animals – both real and metaphorical, which add to the frequently bizarre aspects of her lyrical style of poetry. The peculiar front cover for ‘Gloria’, a patchwork donkey, is a fitting nod to the animal covers chosen for many of her collections.
Hill’s other collections, such as ‘Portrait of My Lover as a Horse’, contain book-length series of poems and this anthology shows the thematic unity running through much of her poetry. The poems have a humorous yet dark feel to them, dwelling on themes such as family relationships, isolation, childhood and the individual identities of men and women. It is clear in this collection that just beneath the surface of her poetry lays a vivid connection to universal truth. This is a rich and varied selection of poems from a sophisticated and experimental poet, and throughout Hill seems to be constantly testing and pushing the boundaries of her own poetry. Her use of language is not pretentious or excessive; often her most complex and striking images are created using just a few select words. Hard-hitting and straight to the point, Hill’s has shown herself to be a strong voice in British poetry.

For more information visit http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/

Cities in Transition is a wide-ranging exploration of “the interactions between the technologies and aesthetics of the moving image and the modern metropolis”.
Patrick Kellier’s piece on ‘Film and the Urban Fabric’ opens the volume with some weighty theorizing on “the genealogical architectonics of film”, indicating that this is not the most suitable text for an introductory film course. Much of what follows focuses on early filmic culture and the correlation between the scientific and artistic revolutions, which were re-fashioning attitudes about space and time, and the potentialities of the moving image. Film also provided a medium through which to explore altered perceptions and the anxieties change inevitably spawned.
Anxieties about ‘the city’ and its dehumanising effects are explored with increasing regularity in later cinema, which is covered in the second half of this volume. Henry James’ photo-essay on ‘The Matrix’ notes how many science-fiction flicks since ‘Blade Runner’ have adopted a film noir approach in their depiction of futuristic cities. This book shows contemporary cinema to demonstrate a mounting sense of paranoia and isolation, absent from the earliest panoramic films celebrating the emerging cityscapes. Meanwhile, lodged in the middle of the book, William Uricchio makes the connection between early experimental cinema and the capabilities of modern technology, which is fascinating and warrants more attention than the footnote he affords it here.
If film does indeed make audible the music of the modern metropolis, it is no wonder that the divine force at the heart of the Matrix is himself an Architect. As such, Cities in Transition offers seventeen insightful, if brief, reminders of the debt architecture owes to a century of cinema, even if the disapproving tone of Chris Petit’s A-Z of London Cinema proves there is still much to be done in fully articulating the dynamics of that architecture onto the big screen.

For more information visit http://www.wallflowerpress.co.uk/

‘Consider the Lilies’ is told through Jack, a homeless man, as he searches for Vicky, a friend he has lost on the streets.
Jack traces Vicky’s origins and upbringing in order to find her in the present, uncovering her feral childhood and life in a succession of institutions. That would be fine, but Fenlon creates another device to explain Jack’s obsession – her supernatural knowledge of his past. This seems a crude attempt to link the search for Vicky to Jack’s flashbacks of his descent into homelessness. Jack also repeatedly insists his obsession has nothing to do with sexual attraction, which feels more like Fenlon steering herself away from what might have been an interesting moral dilemma for the narrative to take on.
Vicky’s past is the dominant feature as the novel skips through diaries, medical notes and Jack’s mind, which unfortunately has the effect of making Jack’s flashbacks an annoying distraction. Vicky’s mother is an excellent character, warped by religion and abandoned by her lover. Jack’s family and friends are, by comparison, frustratingly opaque.
The resolutions Fenlon gives the characters are small moments of peace, letting us know that although we might view these people as disadvantaged, they are happy with their identities. This book is not perfect, but does tackle issues about who we should be trying to help, and what we should be trying to change.

For more information, visit http://www.impress-books.co.uk/

Some say that a tragedy will bring people together, for the Trebor family it took more than one but a series of tragic events finally did it.

‘Do I love you?’ is Paul McDonald’s third novel, like McDonald’s two previous novels, ‘Surviving Sting’ and ‘Kiss Me Softly, Amy Turtle?’; ‘Do I Love You?’ is set in his native Walsall. It is also guaranteed to have you laughing out loud.

Minty, a lollipop man and Northern Soul fanatic; his wife Hazel, an obsessive-compulsive nurse and their son, Nigel (or Trebbo as he prefers to be known), who is constantly striving for 'cool', face a string of mishaps and misadventures as the result of a song on a fried chicken advert.

Frank Wilson’s Northern Soul classic, ‘Do I love you (Indeed I Do)’ is the song that changes their lives. After two hospital admittances, a near-death experience for five grown men and two degus, a police raid, a theft, a run-in with a raccoon-skin hat-wearing drug dealer named Blubber-T, the Trebbo family come to the realization that, indeed they do.

‘Do I Love you?’ proves McDonald’s talent in creating a hilarious situation out of characters who are painfully real—characters who are downright pathetic and profoundly flawed—and bizarre and outrageous events.

A great read, thoroughly recommended to anyone who searching for an unflinching depiction of life in the Midlands, a historical and sociological view of the Northern Soul scene or anyone in need of a life-affirming laugh.

Available to buy from Amazon