This was Gordon Burn’s debut novel; released in 1991 it won the Whitbread Book Award. The novel is based upon a real character, the singer Alma Cogan, who was extremely successful in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Known as, “the girl with the giggle in her voice, “ Cogan was the highest paid B...
Norman Miller used to be one of Fleet Street's finest. Now he's a middle-aged, burned-out hack with a gift for the sensational story, the shouting tabloid lead. But as he reports on a series of brutal murders and sex crimes, he's forced to wonder whether he is just a witness - or part of some dee...
In a forensic dissection of Britain's souring landscape Gordon Burn tells the tale of Ray Cruddas, a light entertainer effecting a semi-dignified retreat from his fading career, who returns to the unnamed northern town of his youth.
Jackie scrubbed himself red every morning but still the smells seemed to stay on his breath and in his nostrils and he was reminded for the first time in a long time of the Billingsgate fish smell carried by brash Mr Solomons and which would linger about him like a rumour no matter what. &n...