Tom Benn

The tragic lives of three generations of women, widows and children of Manchester gangsters, marooned on their home estate of Wythenshawe. A disturbing story of violence, neglect and criminality which for some is everyday life.

Told in a dreamy but hard edged poetic style. As I got into the book I was trying to think of what reminded me of the way it was told and the poet John Cooper Clark came to mind. But this is by no means funny or comedic. But it has that cynical, rattling, made up adjectives and odd verbs way of speaking. Grandmother and mother are both widowed. Their gangster husbands dead in a car crash. An accident? Who knows. The fifteen year old granddaughter has just given birth to an unwanted unregistered, unacknowledged child. Her mother lives in a dream world visited regularly by the lover she took whilst her husband was in jail and who suffered the inevitable deadly fate of someone in that position. The grandmother has open house for the children of her estate, feeding them and caring for them whilst their mothers neglect them. There is no happy ending. The hard life passes from one generation to the next.

The blurb on the inside back cover tells me that the author 'teaches on the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA'. It seems almost every author these days is teaching creative writing at one university or the other.… (mer)