Description

By Andy Cattrall

ISBN: 978-1-84747-974-7
Published: 2009
Pages: 324
Key Themes: mental health, empowerment

ALSO AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

Description

Persecution, I think, is my Big Issue. Danny Sharrot – freak, fake, an’ even pedo – has had a hard loner’s furrow to plough, like. He’s had to tackle potential lynch packs of giants all on his petrified back. An’ he’s had to forgive, wit’ hugely strange optimism, like Christ on the Cross. A plague X was scratched into his door in a delusional manic hostel, a long vacant-eyed time on from hilarious death in the devious Planet Factory, but well before the pointlessly negative spike in the princely Tower of Cameras. One hundred words? One million, even? Wasted…

About the Author

Andy was born into a Naval family in Portsmouth, England, in 1975. He has two sisters, one born in Malta and one born in Elgin, Scotland.

He was educated at Holbrook, the Naval Boarding school in Suffolk. At 16 he left Holbrook and completed his education at a local secondary school.

He has never had a full-time job, but has had a number of part-time jobs including gardening.

His main interest is writing in all its forms. He hopes to become a full-time, successful writer.

Book Extract

I live in a busy little neighbourhood, y’see. On this estate in Milton – down here at the far end of mile long Locksway Road, a half hour walk, a 20 minute bus ride, or a 10 minute cycle ride from the centre of the most densely populated city in Europe of around a ¼ mile, jus’ around the corner from the Old Oyster House pub and the Thatched House eatery, across the road from a massive sports field with floodlit all-weather surface areas, and within 2 minutes of Langstone Harbour, the Island City’s smaller beachy eastern harbour – the Harbour in the West is the world famous Naval dockyard – as well as a thousand or so Council homes, we’ve got a privately-owned chatty Happy Shopper, an’ two bus stops, which’re directly outside my window; we’ve got Two Saints homeless rehousing project; a children’s’ home; a home for the mentally handicapped; Saint James’ mental health hospital, and a student campus too.
Yes, this community, though something of a sweet hive away from wasp-cruel, wasp-pointless inner UK, is nonetheless a fiestily thronging cross-section of the UK. This little cul-de-sac in the vast pre-Armageddon sprawl buzzes with a fascinating range of the best, and worst, thing in life. Folk.
Some of whom are proper friends, daily chats of mine, like; and many of whom are familiar strangers – to use the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly’s phrase which I myself once made up then had to delete when I found it on the cover of his Selected Poems. I mean, they are friends but I know them only through the news…