Ten Storey Love Song [Paperback]

Richard Milward (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2009

Spanning one dynamite paragraph, "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. Bobby - the so-called 'love child of Keith Haring and Basquiat', hoped up in a Middlesbrough tower block - works on his canvases under the influence of pills-on-toast, acid-on-crackers and Francis Bacon. When Bent Lewis, a famous art dealer and mover-shaker from that London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a sweaty adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence involving a 2.5cm-head curved claw hammer. 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. A blistering, nearly stream-of-consciousness novel about the lives and loves of a group of misfits living in a British council estate, Milward's sophomore effort (after Apples) is a collage of druggy, grungy indulgences that is unexpectedly touching. Bobby the Artist paints bright, primitive canvases while tripping on acid. Georgie, his girlfriend and muse, is devoted to Bobby, but terrified of his lifestyle. Johnnie, the local drug dealer, has a hardcore pornography habit that's left him unable to satisfy the more gentle needs of his beautiful girlfriend, Ellen. Then there's middle-aged Allen Blunt, who spends a disturbing amount of time hanging around a local primary school. After Bobby's art is discovered and he begins a meteoric ride through the art world, Johnnie and Ellen forge a more profound bond, and Allen's life disintegrates after a run of bad (and violent) decisions. The narrative moves at a breakneck pace (the book is one very long paragraph), cleverly moving between characters and finding the right moments to pause for the rare tender moment. It's a high-wire act on a par with the better Irvine Welsh books. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

"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." -- Helen Walsh, author of Once Upon a Time in England

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (February 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571242251
• ISBN-13: 978-0571242252
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,892,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's mint., March 29, 2010

By 

Jennifer AsWell (Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ten Storey Love Song: A Novel (Paperback)

Raw, honest, trippy. Written in one gigantic rambling paragraph, it's not for someone who is a literary snob by any means. There is minimal punctuation and no indentations but I have no complaints because the writing style fits the story perfectly. The characters are very real and well developed. I laughed, I was disgusted, it made me think. If you have ever had to question whether something was really growing out of the wall or not, this book is for you.