Tom Cox

Benji is an imaginative eight-year-old boy, living with his parents in a mining village in Nottinghamshire amidst the spoil heaps and chip shops that characterise the last industrially bruised outposts of the Midlands, just before Northern England begins. His family are the eccentric neighbours on a street where all the houses are set on a tilt, slowly subsiding into the excavated space below. Told through Benji’s voice and a colourful variety of others over a deeply joyful and strange twelve-month period, it’s a story about growing up, the oddness beneath the everyday, what we once believed the future would be, and those times in life when anything seems possible.

1983 is steeped in the distinctive character of a setting far weirder than it might at first appear: from robots living next door, and a school caretaker who is not all he seems, to missing memories and the aliens Benji is certain are trying to abduct him.

This novel is a captivating and nostalgic exploration of childhood, imagination and freedom, from the bestselling author Tom Cox.

1983

Laura Dobie

I used to view my memory as a sealed metal box of images in my mind. In reality it's a colony of ants, off doing their own thing in a back room while I am busy elsewhere. Also, as one knows, sometimes you think an ant is just an ant, but it's actually a flying ant, waiting to sprout wings.

No, do not let us be smug, but can we be permitted to revela little, to let our hearts fill up with this wild and reassuring life-size montage of the tiny people we once taught? Malcolm can travel the country and see his own paintings, knowing most of them will outlive him. What we leave behind is less tangible, but I like to think it is no les real. The changes we made are more fragmentary than our original vision of them, but many of those fragments float forward, undying, into the future.

Hilarious - and accurate - description of Italian drivers.

People drove differently in Italy to the way they drove back it reminded me of a cartoon TV series I watched called Wacky Races, which was full of vehicles of all shapes and sizes being driven creatively by a variety of exciting humans and human-adjacent creatures. As soon as we'd crossed the border from Switzerland, we'd seen a stream of cars reversing at top speed down the hard shoulder to escape a traffic jam, which was ke being shown a sign that said, ‘Hello, you are in Italy now!’ It seemed to me that Italian people drove the way my friends and probably would, if we could drive…

1983 quotes

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