It’s Gone Dark Over Bill’s Mother’s
Dominated by the working-class matriarch, this collection celebrates the stories that would otherwise go untold.
With a sharp eye and tough warmth, It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s – a Potteries saying for ‘it looks like rain’ – Lisa Blower strikes a new chord in regional and working-class fiction.
From the wise, witty and outspoken Nan of ‘Broken Crockery’, who has lived and worked in Stoke on Trent for all of her 92 years, never owning a passport, to happy hooker Ruthie in ‘The Land of Make Believe’; to sleep deprived Laura in ‘The Trees in the Wood’; to young mum Roxanne in ‘The Cherry Tree’; she appears in many shapes and forms, and always with a stoicism that is hard to break down.
Her hometown Stoke-on-Trent is the setting that binds together different narrative forms and a fearsome array of matriarchs.
Kerry Hudson
Includes:
Worth buying for the first story alone… heart-breaking is too mundane a word to describe it.
Robin Ince
Praise for It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s
Reading Lisa’s stories is like being given the privilege of scouring over the UK’s lesser known towns and picking the roofs off people’s houses, then the tops off their minds and delving in to the innermost thoughts and feelings and heartaches and eccentricities of all of those diverse and beautiful and terrible human beings whose stories we hardly ever hear. I wish there was a Johnny Dangerously in everybody’s heart.
Lisa Blower is a rare thing – a working class voice in the world of the short story. Her stories are at times the laugh-out-loud funny of Alan Bennet and at others, the achingly sad of the great, David Constantine.
A really lovely collection of stories… like Alan Bennet’s monologues, they’re wonderfully funny and wise… Lisa Blower writes with precision and humour; she is a master of the short story form and really stands out for me.
Emotionally draining, hard-hitting and brilliantly written. I came away from this collection with the sense that here is a writer who could take her talent in any direction.
Stunningly engaging writing… in equal parts comedic and achingly sad.
Top-notch short fiction, showing remarkable depth of voice, character and human bonds.
This is a fine collection of 20 tough but tender tales by a writer who celebrates the lives of uncelebrated people with compassion and caustic wit.
An immense collection. So filmic as well. I had to read it twice to confirming beautiful awareness.
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