<p>Part hallucination, part queer bildungsroman, Never Was is a beautifully strange novel about grief, addiction, transmasculinity and class, taking us from a limbo of lost dreams to a small salt- mining town and exploring the way identity is both inherited and re-invented.\nDaniel sits on a clifftop in the aftermath of a party at Fin's mansion, looking out over a junky sea. Daniel's not sure why they're there, or who Fin is, even though Fin seems to be somebody famous. To find out, Daniel must tell Fin the story of their childhood, going back to a small salt-mining town in The North, a visit from their now-estranged relative Crystal, and the life and losses of their salt-miner father, Mika.\nTaking us from bus shelters to playgrounds to McDonalds, from the depth of a salt mine to a nightclub toilet, Daniel describes their world of soap operas, sunglasses, newspaper clippings and Princess Diana, steering Fin through the events that led up to The Great Subsidence, when their town and the mine that sustained it collapsed. As Daniel tells their story, they come to learn they’re in a place called Never Was, a limbo for lost dreams and disappointments, a landfill for things that never came to be, but also a place of change and transition. Dreamy, poignant, and revelatory, Never Was is a bewitching and inventive novel by an inimitable voice in literary fiction.</p>

Never Was

Literature & Fiction

Gavin, Honor

Literary

Cipher Press

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2015 An industrial accident in a wire factory and the chance discovery of a birth certificate. Church services held in a ruined swimming pool. An unidentified elephant skull. Midland tells the stories of three young women as they fight to find their feet amidst the accumulated rubble of the twentieth century. From the bombsites of the 1940s to the construction sites of the 1960s and the school halls and decaying tower blocks of the 1980s, Honor Gavin has created an ingenious narrative of one Midlands family that is also a startling, anarchic history of a city. Composed in electric prose that soars and dives, blending keenly observed dialect with urban theory, cinema, farcical digressions and surrealist timekeeping, Midland is a novel out of time but in the middle of everything. - REVIEWS "To me, reading this book was dream-like as I sequenced between nostalgia and explicitly remembered detail. The narrative scenarios drew me into a believable world that was also a kind of science fiction. I loved the way that Honor played with language, peppering the pages with a wonderful mix of colloquiums and made up words that brought me closer to the heart of the world I was suspended in." - GAVIN TURK, ARTIST & JUDGE FOR THE 2015 GORDON BURN PRIZE "An original, sparky and fresh voice. Midland makes the female family epic anew and exhilarating." - CHERRY SMYTH, WRITER & CRITIC

Midland

History

Europe

Penned in the Margins

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Books by Gavin, Honor