Ten Storey Love Song

'"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.

Pay attention; the future looks like this... Brash and loud, with startling flashes of pure poetry -- Kate Saunders The Times
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 -- Irvine Welsh Guardian
Astounding -- Lauren Laverne
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 BRASS
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 -- Richard Godwin Literary Review
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 -- Ethnie Farry Marie Clare
It's a mixture of the grotesque and the comic which is lifted by Milward's wild metaphors -- Lee Rourke
Behind its craftily delirious prose and low-life lyricism, the novel has artistic ambition to spare' Independent

Richard Milward was born in Middlesbrough in 1984. His cult debut Apples was published in 2007 when Richard was twenty-two years old, followed by Ten Storey Love Song in 2009 and Kimberly's Capital Punishment in 2012. Apples was shortlisted for The South Bank Show/Times Breakthrough Award 2008, Ten Storey Love Song was chosen as one of Waterstones New Voices 2009, and Kimberly's Capital Punishment was picked as Time Out Book of the Week in 2012. Both Apples and Ten Storey Love Song were adapted for the stage, winning awards at the Edinburgh Fringe.

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