A home for working-class readers and writers
https://thebeemagazine.com
The Bee
Loading...
In this live recording for the Working Class Library podcast Val McDermid will be talking to hosts @clairemalcolm.bsky.social and Richard Benson about the Scottish crime novel that most inspired her – William McIlvanney's Laidlaw. See you there!
www.hexhambookfestival.co.uk/event/the-wo...
The resulting feelings of aggressive displacement have been insufficiently documented. Keshed not only documents them, it articulates why those feelings are more than just nostalgia.
There's so much more to the novel than that, but that idea stuck with me long after I'd finished.
the relationship with his family, which buckled under the pressures of capitalism. It’s about an individual who struggled after as the first in his family to have gone into higher education. Behind that, it’s the story of the disappearing social structures that held working-class lives together.
It took a while to digest Keshed by @stuhennigan.bsky.social , because it's such a big, powerful and important novel.
Apart from anything else, it brings home how xlass works on you internally and externally, a combination of feeling and material conditions.
Hennigan grew up in a working-class Yorkshire family, and lives in Leeds. He’ll be known to many readers as the author of Ghost Signs, a lauded memoir about his time delivering food parcels during the pandemic
In recent years, our industrial cities – none more so than Leeds – have been built over with shopping centres and high-rise apartment blocks that are unaffordable to the people who used to live there.
Hennigan’s ability to connect the lone person with the social context explains the praise from publications like the Times Literary Supplement.
Keshed, his first novel, is part experimental fiction, part kitchen-sink romance, part addiction story – and a unique account of the unmaking of the British working class.
It tells the story of a dying man reviewing the wreckage of his past life and...
All in all, an oustanding achievement that should be on plenty of best-of-the-year lists come the autumn.
