‘”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.
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.
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Reviews
In one breathless, drug-fuelled rush of a paragraph, Milward colours in the lives of a bunch of mavericks, misfits and pill-popping cohorts living in a Middlesbrough tower block... sex, violence and cracked poetry get mixed up in a gritty, urban Day-Glo, oddly beautiful, kind of way
Astounding
Milward has that rare gift of being able to capture and distil an entire generation in a single, simple sentence. Brilliant. Very very funny and utterly original
Behind its craftily delirious prose and low-life lyricism, the novel has artistic ambition to spare'
Milward writes at such pace that the impulse it to down it in one... The real marvel of Milward, though, more so than his casual reporting of filth and violence, is his ability to make you care
It's a mixture of the grotesque and the comic which is lifted by Milward's wild metaphors
Pay attention; the future looks like this... Brash and loud, with startling flashes of pure poetry
Milward is a major talent, and his love for his characters shines through any degrading obstacles he forces them to encounter. When writers are being churned out of creative fiction courses like salmon from fish farms, he possesses that scarcest quality: a highly original and engaging voice