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Ten Storey Love Song

A Novel

Richard Milward

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Ten Storey Love Song
 

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Richard Milward

Richard Milward is 24 and recently graduated from Central St Martin’s Art College with a Fine Art degree. In 2007 Faber published his first novel, Apples, to huge critical acclaim. Richard was also shortlisted for the 2007 South Bank Show Times Breakthrough Award. He lives in Middlesbrough, where he grew up.



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"Milward's sophomore effort is a collage of druggy, grungy indulgences that is unexpectedly touching....The narrative moves at a breakneck pace, cleverly moving between characters and finding the right moments to pause for the rare tender moment. It's a high-wire act on a par with the better Irvine Welsh books."


- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Milward is a major talent, and his love for his characters shines through any degrading obstacles he forces them to encounter. When writers are being churned out of creative fiction courses like salmon from fish farms, he possesses that scarcest quality: a highly original and engaging voice. He's also a novelist of great emotional power and deft skill."


- Irvine Welsh, The Guardian
“Milward (now 24) has a verbal dexterity that makes it [the novel in one paragraph] worth the extra effort. Besides, he writes at such pace that the impulse is to down it in one . . . the celebration of the everyday is overwhelmingly the pleasure of this book. Perhaps Milward’s hero Irvine Welsh is the best point of comparison, but there is also a present-tense sense of motion, a wonder at simple things and a total lack of embarrassment reminiscent of Updike’s Rabbit, Run. The real marvel of Milward, though, more so than his casual reporting of filth and violence, is his ability to make you care.’


- Richard Godwin, Literary Review
"From the wunderkind of the latest wave of chemical generation writing, Richard Milward, Ten Storey Love Song returns to the low-rent, high-rise Middlesbrough estates of his fabulous debut, Apples. This time, in an intense, colourful slab of concrete writing without a single chapter or even paragraph break, he brings vividly to life the inner and outer existences of the inhabitants of Peach House, a tower block whose inhabitants include Bobby, a drug-addled artist, and Johnnie, for whom thieving and thuggery are simply a way of earning a living. The lively storyline makes the prose a pleasure to read for all its lack of breaks, but the writing is what sets it apart. Milward's eye is at once unsparing, warm and compassionate; here, he is wonderfully able to create a world where shambolic dysfunction and terrible violence coexist with flights into hedonism that have a quality of almost transcendent beauty."


- Metro London
"In one breathless, drug-fuelled rush of a paragraph, 24-year-old arts graduate Richard Milward colours in the lives of a bunch of mavericks, misfits and pill-popping cohorts living in a Middlesbrough tower block . sex, violence and cracked poetry get mixed up in a gritty, urban Day-Glo, oddly beautiful, kind of way."


- Marie Claire (UK)
"Pay attention; the future looks like this. Richard Milward is a 24-year-old from Middlesbrough, and his second novel is uncompromisingly set out in a single paragraph. The solid lump of prose looks a little daunting, but it leads the reader into a kind of drug-fuelled La Bohème set in a tower block....Brash and loud, with startling flashes of pure poetry."


- The Times (London)
'"'Precocious talent'' is a much-abused phrase in the book world, but 24-year-old Richard Milward is the real deal. His 2007 debut Apples was a raw, fearless and funny tale of teenage love on a Midlands council estate, and with this follow-up, his distinctive voice has gained even more strength. Told in one unbroken paragraph (don't worry, you get used to it), Ten Storey Love Song charts the dysfunctional lives of the inhabitants of a tower block. A lot of sex and drugs are involved but nothing feels gratuitous; Milward's prose has a lyrical undertone and the all-important ring of truth. Highly recommended."


- The London Paper
"It's an unsettling way to start a novel. Unsettlement continues as the subsequent narrative unreels into a 287-page unbroken paragraph. I think that may be a literary record . this follow up as the same qualities as his well-received debut, Apples. It's youthful, zany, and consistently funny. Middlesbrough, as depicted by Milward is a hugely entertaining place to read about. One might not want to live there, though - particularly in a ten-storey tower block."


- Financial Times
“Ten Storey Love Song is an utterly absorbing novel. . . . Full of flawed and captivating characters, this is a truly riveting novel that sweeps along at a fast and very enjoyable pace”


- Ruth Atkins, Borders (from round-ups in The Bookseller)
"A product of a vile mind. Well done."


- Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom
"Milward has that rare gift of being able to capture and distil an entire generation in a single, simple sentence. Brilliant. Very very funny and utterly original."


- Helen Walsh, author of Once Upon a Time in England