Book description
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', holed 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 from that London appears, Bobby and friends
are sent on a sweaty adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and
violence involving a 2. 5cm-head claw hammer. A love song to a
loveless Teesside and a portrait of a deeply dysfunctional, creative
and drug-sodden world, Ten Storey Love Song is a ferocious slab of
concrete prose peppered with beauty and delivered with glorious abandon.
Richard Milward was born in Middlesbrough in 1984. His debut
novel, APPLES, was published in 2007 and was described by Irvine Welsh
as 'one of the best books I've ever read about being young, working
class and British.'
