This is a hard-hitting fiction, with a Bristolian voice as distinctive as that of Irvine Welsh's Edinburgh or Niall Griffiths' Liverpool. A new novelist tackles a taboo subject head on and with humanity - his aim to show the truth of marginalised modern-day lives. 'Jason's me brother, e's fifteen an e's lush. Gives I presents, says lovely things, gives I a cuddle. I'd do anything for Jase. And I do. I gotta tell you about summat now. I knows it's naughty an that but sometimes I dooz stuff with Our Jase. Stuff that you ain't gotta do'. Knowle West, Bristol. An estate of 25,000 people and one pub. It's Shawnie Brewer's 13th birthday and no one's got her a present. Mum Lisa is on the White Lightning, not far off comatose; her psychopath of a dad is behind bars. Shawnie deserves better than this, which is why Jason has nicked her a slab of 200 Marlboros from the shops up Broadwalk. Jason's a ruffian but he loves Shawnie and looks after her - the local kids know better than to pick on her twice. But it's a love that's messed up - ever since the nightmare of early childhood they've had only each other to turn to. And then Lisa's 'lovurr' - cynical cockney Steve - kick-starts that nightmare again. Leaving Shawnie, with her odd gullibility, vulnerable to everyone else's awful desires. In dialect voices that create a claustrophobic domestic world, the four residents of Lurgan Walk tell a visceral, darkly humorous tale. This is an unsettling yet compassionate novel about family life gone very wrong, a hell just down the road.