Search results for ""Author Andrew Dutton""

Welcome-welcome-welcome-welcome to Being Young! And to the inner life and internet ragepage of Natasha [Redacted]. Her rst name is all you’re getting: there are too many haters, trolls and stupid adults out there. Iffen you understand me then you’ve picked up the rhythm of my heartbeat and maybe you’re a friend. But that means you’re a potential danger too, if you get too close and you know too much—be careful. Original, compelling and moving, Natasha [Redacted] is a coming of age story that charts the costs of trying to survive in the poisonous jungle that is ‘growing up’. Family breakdown, friends who turn out to be anything but friends, parents and their love interests who want bland conformity above all else, Internet wars and real-world violence populate Natasha’s Internet ‘ragepage’. And we see Natasha too though her self-appraising ‘sleevenotes’, penned some unknown time after the events that she describes. At the end of it all, has she grown up? Will you like the answer anymore than Natasha does? Whatever the answer—if you’ve ever loved music with a matchless passion, wanted to form a band and play a gig on the Moon, you could be the friend that Natasha is waiting for. Read on...

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Charting a life spent lost in numbers, is My Life in Receipts a memoir? Too fictionalised. A novella? Too close to the truth. All too recognisable? YES! From chanting times-tables and unlearning old money to discovering the sinking schoolroom ‘Maths Feeling’ that ends a child’s ambitions to be a ‘scientist’. From the promissory note of student days to the hard times of the dole giro. From the exuberance of the first wage packet to the pleasures and limits of being able to pay your way… My Life in Receipts plunges you into the world of bags full of threatening letters, intimidating bailiffs, bankruptcy, eviction—even imprisonment. Revealing the lives of people in a perpetual cost of living crisis, and the work of those who help them fight to reclaim their lives, this is a dark, original and tragi-comic exploration of the past, the future, money, debt: whether to flee, whether to fight. There are some victories, some routs—and, along the way, thoughts on electronic train tickets too. Andrew Dutton will make you laugh out loud, scream with righteous anger and, most of all, make you think.

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Alfred Wayman is an enigma: solitary, strange and with no past. All that is known of him is his hatred of falsehood and obsession with the night sky. 
Friends and enemies speculate on his character and history; some aiming to understand him, others to destroy him. In doing so they reveal their stories and the loves, hates, jealousies and rivalries that make them who they are.
 Wayman thrives in darkness, but every night must come to an end and the night-creature must face the triumph of the light.

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Will the past never leave the present in peace? Did you learn family tales at your grandmother’s knee? Just harmless old stories. But what of the reality behind them? The Beauty of Chell Street is the story of a family dominated by its own poisonous mythology; one which outlives them all. Nora Wilson endlessly recounts the story of her betrayal by her husband, Sam, during her heyday as the incomparable Beauty of Chell Street. Her demands to a lost God for Sam’s damnation become her only life force. Long after their deaths, when their great-granddaughter, Francine, discovers old pictures of Nora and Sam, their story obsesses her. As she collects the past, Francine is as single-minded as Nora and as ruthless as Sam. Can she even cheat time and death to get to the people who knew Nora and Sam? As betrayal weaves its way through turnabout time periods and Francine assembles her evidence, the story is told again and again into Francine’s old age while the image of Nora remains frozen, looking out from the photograph that started it all, forever the beauty of Chell Street.

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THE PUB IS THE HUB – And the hub of this pub is Pilot Ken, the affable crossword solver of the Bat and Ball, first to arrive and last to leave every drinking day. So the stories of Ken and his companions unwind with pub-talk and laughter, some genuine, some hollow; peppered with Ken’s eccentric theories: Does space actually curve towards pubs? Abounding in arguments over politics and trivia, rich in personal tales and tragedies, large and small. As the town slips further into terminal decline, Ken’s story weaves with the characters he drinks with. Meet Jim, the fully-qualified giant; landlady Evil Mand and her running battle with the pubco; Frank Speke, who crusades for his right to say whatever he pleases, no matter how offensive; Emily, the theatre director and Pomo, the Clown, both, trying to fend off the burgeoning cultural desert; Wayne, freed from the ties of convention by his decision to drink himself to death; FMC, the lonely class warrior; and Nev, who wants white people to stop behaving like idiots around him. When Ken’s posse is exiled from the Bat and Ball by a hostile temporary landlord who ousts the regulars in an attempt to ‘revive’ the pub; we travel with them on their fruitless tour in search of a new home and triumphant return, mapping the troubled, dying town where the pub is the last redoubt of decency, friendship and bar-room philosophy. Yet always there hovers the shadow of death-in-a-glass, from which nobody is exempt. Crosswords, love, life, death. Love, life, death, crosswords. Praise for Andrew Dutton’s debut novel: Nocturne: Wayman’s Sky Intriguing, very original. — The Stoke Sentinel

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