Richard Milward

Kimberly Clark was born to the sound of cackling witches in 1984. Having moved to London to follow her heart's dream, the sweet-but-slow Stevie, she soon tires of him and decides to destroy the relationship from within by being as vile as is humanly possible. When this tactic leads to Stevie's violent death by his own hand, Kimberly's soul hangs in the balance - will she ultimately spend eternity in the great TopShop in the sky? Or will she be hurtled into an abyss of endless physical torture, sexual humiliation and bad stand-up comedy? This is the story of Kimberly's redemption, or possibly the story of her damnation: it's up to you. There are six different endings on offer. This is a shocking, laugh-out-loud, nightmare-and-nausea-inducing book. It is a wild narrative experiment that recalls taboo-busting writers from William Burroughs to Irvine Welsh to Chuck Palahniuk.

Kimberly's Capital Punishment

Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London purveyor of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century.

Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a ‘fantabulosa crime’ in 276 days that will revolt the world. A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Paris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter - but, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever intended.

Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire and Jean Genet's jailbird fantasies, Man-Eating Typewriter is an act of seductive sedition by a writer with unfathomable literary talent and boldness. Wild, transgressive, erotic and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making; a book that will be talked about, celebrated and puzzled over for decades.

Man-Eating Typewriter

Apples

Luke Barnes

Ten Storey Love Song follows Bobby the Artist's rise to stardom and horrific drug psychosis, Johnnie's attempts to stop thieving and start pleasing Ellen in bed, and Alan Blunt, a forty-year-old truck driver who spends a worrying amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school. A love song to a loveless Teesside, Ten Storey Love Song is a ferocious slab of concrete prose, peppered with beauty and delivered with glorious abandon. Middle Child returned from the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival as award winners for their production of Weekend Rockstars and Ten Storey Love Song will look much the same: part play, part house party and a truly good night out.

Ten Storey Love Song

Man Eating Typewriter

Ten storey love song

As a distraction from sleazy male admirers, spiteful classmates and her mother's cancer, Eve's eyes are opened to a multicolour life of one-night stands, drug-fuelled discos and endless varieties of cheap plonk. She barely has time to notice Adam. Adam, however, notices Eve.

'I found the eyeball fifteen minutes before I found the rest of him.' Having moved to London with her athletic boyfriend, the sweet-but-stuttering Stevie, Kimberly soon tires of him and decides to destroy the relationship from within by being as cruel as humanly possible. When her tactics lead to Stevie's violent death by his own hand, Kimberly embarks on a determined, but no less disastrous, venture in 'unadulterated altruism'. Her soul hangs in the balance - will she ultimately spend eternity in the great TopShop in the Sky? Will she be reincarnated as a pampered greyhound or a deadly bacterium? Or will she be cast into the abyss, tormented endlessly by her past demons and her malevolent pet hamster Lucifer? This is the story of Kimberly's redemption, or possibly her damnation: it's up to you. There are six different endings on offer.

Out of the bleakness of their Middlesbrough housing estate, fuelled by cheap plonk, porn and dysfunctional families, Adam and Eve narrate this dazzling, tragicomic love story of adolescence in all its fucked-up glory. '[An] unbelievably good, affecting, unpretentious debut novel . . . more than anything, Apples feels truthful: whether the drugs, the sex, the boozing or the brutal insecurities of adolescence, it all smacks beautifully of the real thing.' Jon Elek, Time Out 'Wonderful . . . Apples is unlike any other novel I've read. Who knows? We may have discovered our J.D. Salinger early.' John Sutherland, Financial Times 'Crass, graphic, funny and unnerving . . . Well constructed and streaming with gorgeous language, it's a frighteningly recognisable glimpse into a particular experience of adolescence.' Catherine Taylor, Guardian 'A retelling of Paradise Lost set on a Middlesbrough housing estate, Apples is . . . experimental, fearless, funny and frightening.' Sarah Hughes, Observer 'Electrifying.' Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

Richard Milward

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