Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20104 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

The Times Magazine
'Apples is an astonishing debut ... Catcher in the Rye meets the Arctic Monkeys.'

Financial Times
'A wonderful take on amoral youth ... Apples is unlike any other novel I've read. Who knows? We may have discovered our J. D. Salinger early. '

thelondonpaper
'Heartbreaking, honest and accurate ... a tough, explicit yet tender coming-of-age story.'

Customer Reviews

read but not forgotten
Had to read it seen cover first then read review and wahey! a story about 'boro, nothing to boast about being a 'smoggy' as you'll find when you read it though..... teenage drugs, sex and dodgy doings, was expecting adam and eve to be tad older. it was good but a bit all over place, but on a plus side def seems to be a likeness to irvin welsh. i really did enjoy this but it is not a story as such so dont expect one.... although a few things are thrown in randomly but dont seem to fit, you'll know what i mean when you read it. it is def worth reading but dont build your hopes up like i did. would def read something from him again.

There's no place like home
I read it because it was set in Middlesbrough, amidst the vast range of council estates where my gran, Auntie Hilda and Auntie May lived when I was a kid. My parents were both brought up in Middlesbrough, which was voted the UK's worst place to live not long ago. Nevertheless I do feel some affection for the place. Not long ago, my Auntie Hilda's whole street was demolished because it had turned into a no-go area, so I realised that things had changed a bit - just not this much. At the beginning I was so shocked I almost gave up, but it takes a lot to put me off a book. By the end, their mundane but astonishing lives began to seem normal, and I did want to find out what happened to the sub-anti-hero characters.

There's another book about Middlesbrough, written in 1948, about a lad called Joe Smith on leave from the Navy during the war, The Wind That Blows by F.W. Lister. At the time, I think Joe's behaviour might have been as surprising to your average middle aged professional as Apples' Eve and Adam were to me. Maybe all books set in Middlesbrough are destined to be a bit of a shock. There's birth, death, drugs, sex, rape, cancer and underage everything, written in a matter-of-fact was as if the whole thing is perfectly normal. But then, that's the whole point.

To read about the street where I stayed with my gran, the school my mother taught in and the estates I walked through to get packets of sweets and pints of milk, described in a way that gives them the familiarity of a parallel universe, is an unusual treat.
Do read it, if you want to know what life's like in the UK for those of us outside the comfy working-middle class. Most first novels are written about what we know and most of us know nothing about this life.

Maybe it ends before the end. Don't wait for a huge Hollywood style conclusion. It just continues the way their lives are going to continue; taking what comes of the mess they've grown up in.

And then this, and then that...
It is easy to see why this book got published. Presumably, some luvvie in a London publishing house thought it sounded "gritty" and "authentic". And so, in some ways, it is. There are undoubtedly young people out there, living life like this.

However, what Milward has done is simply regurgitate his own teenage years, and called it a book. What he has forgotten is some kind of depth, or insight. It is reminiscent of school essays that simply say "and then I did this, and then we did that, and then I did this". The book is terminally repetitive, endlessly recycling the same basic elements. At its' heart is a shallow little plot that, without the arch and knowing descriptions of drugs, would just be feeble.

What, exactly, is "shocking" about this book? That young people take drugs? That young people have fumbling, often joyless sex? It does not seem particularly shocking to learn that life on a Middlesborough estate is not a bowl of cherries. This book lacks insight or maturity in its' telling. It has relied on allegedly surprising details about drugs, booze, and fondling, instead of working out what it is for, or what it might have to say. It also contains very odd anomalies - Adam's reference for who is cool with girls is...Cary Grant. Yes. Exactly. Very 21st century.

This book might appeal to 16-year-olds who think the book is "exactly what my life is like". Fine. It might also appeal to someone so cloistered, that they had no idea young people could behave like this. As for it being "dazzling", or even "tragicomic"; it falls way short of being either of these things.

An immature and forgettable work.