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.

Ten Storey Love Song

Richard Milward

Faber and Faber

The Rectory: Wimbledon's oldest house

London: Artscan, 1992

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Books by Richard Milward

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Richard Milward. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ten Storey Love Song

The Rectory: Wimbledon's oldest house