Product 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', hoped 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 and mover-shaker from that London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a sweaty adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence involving a 2.5cm-head curved claw hammer. A love song to a loveless Teesside, "Ten Storey Love Song" is a ferocious slab of concrete prose peppered with beauty and delivered with glorious abandon.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49242 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 287 pages

About the Author
Richard Milward is 23 and has recently graduated from Central St Martin's Art College with a Fine Art degree. In 2007 Faber published his first novel, Apples, to huge critical acclaim. Richard was also shortlisted for the 2007 South Bank Show Times Breakthrough Award. He lives in Middlesbrough, where he grew up.

Customer Reviews

Low Rise
I enjoyed Richard Milward's first novel, "Apples", so maybe I came to his follow-up with high expectations. Up front I'll say I didn't actually ever dislike "Ten Storey Love Song". At first, it's hard to get into, because of being written as a single paragraph, so it takes a while to get used to the rhythm of a book that doesn't have time jumps and chapters and so on. But once I was over that hump, I found myself going with the characters, all of whom live in a Middlesborough high-rise called Peach House. There's Bobby the Artist who lives with Georgie, and Johnnie the hard man who lives with Ellen, and Alan Blunt with the rhyming nickname; all their lives intertwine in a reasonably entertaining way. Johnnie deals drugs and thinks he's a hard case; he loves Ellen but he doesn't satisfy her in bed, so she has a fling with the hunky guy who lives upstairs. She signs on and avoids job interviews while Johnnie shops in Lidl with his grandma. Bobby works on paintings that attract the attention of a dodgy London art dealer, who's gay and posh unlike anyone who lives in Milward's Middlesborough. This is a quick read with plenty of nice turns of humour. But after about a hundred pages or so, I started hungering for something less mundane. I appreciate that the author's intention must be to look at ordinary lives; yet, while the style of the book is engaging, the narrative is too empty. It's like a takeaway that never satisfies your appetite. Shame.

A peach of a book
Second novel syndrome.

Not as bad as second album syndrome - you can avoid reading a book but music floods in from everywhere innit - but if your first book was rated by everyone from Irvine Welsh to Lauren Laverne and you were touted as the voice of a generation, you could be forgiven for experiencing performance anxiety.

I often judge books by their artwork (shouldn't everyone?) and this one has an ace cover, which matches the story inside. Just one paragraph, which swirls along in a dreamy stream of conciousness; a daring technique which could easily confuse in the wrong hands.

Set in a Middlesbrough Tower block, which is as much a character as the dealers, doleys, drunks, druggy artists who live in it, TSLS is rich in detail which often rings true - the impotence of middle aged men; the boredom of working in a shop; the stupidity and excitement and come downs that are part of that taking a trip; - without being a laborious list of description that lesser writers seem to think = profundity.

A few things jar - the twee naming of inaminate objects (Mr condom - ick); some of the sex scenes - Milward seems to revel in writing horifically detailed sex scenes, containing goo and grime that are b movie horror - but are easy to overlook as the characters are so vivid, banal and flawed that it's impossible not to fall in love with them.

Millward = Genius
This is England, its horrible and unmissable.
If Richard Millward is not the UK's best young writer then I will go and live in Middlesbrough.
Millward"s ability is absolutely unique. How old is he for God's sake?
I'm scared of him.
To portray the banal, the dull, the bleak in such charming glamour is astonishing.
The book is a stream of consciousness, twisting and turning without a second wasted. Glancing in and out of stairwells and bedsits, horror meets beauty. Violence meets tenderness. The odd thing about it is you can't stop reading. There is no point to rest, it's relentless. Put a day aside before picking it up.