Richard Milward - Böcker

'A major talent' Irvine Welsh'Remarkable, beautiful, magic. Like Ulysses for those who can't cope with reading Ulysses' Paolo Hewitt'We're all in the gutter but some of us are ogling the sparkles.'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.

'We got a McDonald's the night my mam got lung cancer.'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 cheap booze. She barely has time to notice the reclusive, obsessive-compulsive Adam. Adam, however, notices Eve.Narrated alternately by Adam and Eve alongside a cast of delinquents, foetuses and butterflies, Apples is an exploration of the sickly-sweet turmoil of growing up and the hazards of getting 'fucked as quick as you can'.First published in 2007 and reissued now by White Rabbit, Apples arrived like a meteor on the literary landscape with Milward barely out of his teenage years.

'"Hello," says the wallpaper.'Spanning one torrential paragraph, Ten Storey Love Song follows Bobby the Artist's rise to stardom and decline into horrific drug psychosis, Johnnie's attempts to stop thieving and start pleasing Ellen in bed, and Alan Blunt, a forty-year-old container driver who spends a worrying amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school.Bobby - the so-called 'love-child of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat', holed up in a Middlesbrough tower block - works on his canvases under the influence of pills-on-toast, dirt-cheap cider and dream pop. When Bent Lewis, an art dealer from London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a breakneck adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence, their frayed lives and assorted addictions - sex, money, fame, pick-'n'-mix and, above all, love - bleeding together in one glorious, ferocious slab of technicolour concrete prose.

'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.

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.