Product Description

You'll never buy supermarket chicken again. "Fresh" is a white knuckle ride from a new voice on the literature scene. This is a visceral, buoyant tale of brotherly love and hate. It is a debut novel from writer recently graduated from UEA writing course with Distinction. Sean's days are of a kind. The factory. The line. The chickens...And Sean's dreams of escape. Then today, his brother Archie gets out of jail on early release. Which would be great if Archie weren't a little loose in the head. And if Sean didn't still owe him a grand. Testing the boundaries of brotherly love, this white-knuckle thriller relives a day in the life that will leave you bowled over and breathless. With the down-at-heel joie de vivre of Roddy Doyle and the wacko plottings of Frank Cotterell Boyce, Mark McNay is an awesome new presence on the literary landscape.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #382833 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

The Times
'Manages to be tough-hearted and tender-minded, but also drop-dead
funny.'

Niall Griffiths
'Funny, moving, gripping, magical and tragic. A brilliant debut.'

Andrew O'Hagan
'Surprising and inventive and new. As a writer McNay seems quite
unafraid, discovering truths and telling stories where he finds them
without the need to lecture you. His language is precise and funny and
alive.'

Customer Reviews

A slice of life...
What a great read. A quick read? Sure. An easy read? That too. Simplistic? Not so sure about that, lots of well observed detail about Scottish working class life, about growing up as a man, about work and love and fear and family. Lost of depth there, explored in lots of levels.

I had one heartsink moment when I thought the author was going to take a well-trodden route so I put the book down, but steeled myself, and was delighted that he'd found another way. I don't know whether you'd have to be a Scot to really get the book. Certainly there's a lot of Glesga patter, and the distinctive humour is both cruel and affectionate.

I found myself caring a lot about Sean and getting caught up in his situation, wondering how, if, he was going to resolve it. Only afterwards did I catch on to the tension between the different solutions on offer: The nice, official, civilised, legal or the scarier, rougher, more macho...

pretty funny
thankfully not too many chicken jokes in this wonderfully amusing and lightly satirical look at how truly appalling life can get. A genuinely new voice and thankfully not too heavy on the scottish patois. I read it in one sitting and laughed out loud. took about a week to get rid of the smell of death from my mind and since jamie olivers shown us what goes on in the life of chickens I doubt I'll be touching the beasts again.

Re-Fresh
Absolutely brilliant! A wonderful, darkly comic story, full of characters you feel you know, and very quickly care about. Highly recommended.