Shark
by Wes Brown
176pp, £3.44
Dog Horn Publishing


Shark is a story about the dispossessed and how they get by.

Ex-soldier and violent deadbeat John Usher returns to his boyhood home of Leeds to find things have changed. His community has been unravelled by gang culture, ethnic tensions and hopelessness.

"In Shark, Wes Brown writes with a kind of rhythmic Northern realism, catching the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act round here; he manages to make the North a marvellous place, a place where art can happen, where epic can feel comfortable..." Ian McMillan, poet and broadcaster.

"Brown is a new generation Updike with the ability to capture the essence of a time and place comparable to Cartwright's Heartland. Never has hard-fought alienation been rendered so tensely familiar and jaw-achingly hard to swallow." Jo Brandon, editor of The Cadaverine

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