LIGHTS A Novel With An Index by Edmund Davie

  "My stomach felt small and tender, shrunken." Lights Edmund Davie.  

The narrator lives in an unnamed city and the action takes course over a 24 hour period from dawn. A burning electronic device thrown through a front window wakes a sleeper. Our hero walks the streets of the city all day, meeting his girlfriend Anne several times and visiting his friend Gerald to collect the wreckage of the device. Gerald has been writing a book and lives amongst the manuscript. The narrator takes the device to be fixed, describes buildings and other features of the city, visits bookshops, bars and a gallery, and plays some music at a concert, after which Anne leaves him for good. The protagonist then returns home to copy out Gerald's book, then goes back to Gerald's house to throw the device through the front window. Along the way the narrator has visions, hallucinations and imaginary experiences, tells a little of his background and indulges in quasi-philosophical musing and pseudo-mystical speculation.

Buy LIGHTS, click the button below.

After studying French literature and teaching English in the South of France, Edmund Davie embarked on a career in electronic music, touring Europe and Asia, while working as an actor, designer, computer programmer and office clerk. Eventually drink and despair led to a period sleeping rough in a boiler room in Moorgate, London, during which time he began work on Lights. Written over a 10 month period beneath a London bank, this is Edmund Davie's first novel. He continues to write poetry, fiction and music and currently lives in London. 

The Diary Of A Cleaner by Gareth Rees

Reflections on war, theology, blackberry crumble and the oppression of cleaning staff. 

Gareth Rees’s writings have appeared in the Guardian, Contemporary Review, No Such Thing as a Free Ride? series of travel anthologies and on BBC Radio. 

The son of a Welsh clergyman, Gareth Rees travelled throughout the US and Europe. Through a foundation that he suspected of being a front for MI6, he got a job on an Israeli kibbutz at the outbreak of the Six Day War. He went on to be arrested in Baghdad, work on a Libyan oil camp during the Qadaffi era and teach music at a secondary school in Gosport, before working as a cleaner at a naval base. This book is a record of those times. Gareth died in Portsmouth, April 2018.

Buy Read Rees, click the button below.

Also available at: 

Donlon Books
75 Broadway Market, London, E8 4PH
Stoke Newington Bookshop 
159 Stoke Newington High Street, London, N16 0NY
Brick Lane Bookshop 
166 Brick Lane, London, E1 6RU
Clapham Books 
26 The Pavement, London, SW4 0JA
Blackwell's Bookshop 
Student’s Centre, Cambridge Road, Portsmouth, PO1 2EF
Adelphi Books
1 Albert Road, Southsea, Portsmouth, PO5 2SE
Night Owls
123 Albert Road, Southsea, Portsmouth, PO5 2SQ 
Jade Mountain Bookshop  
19 Highland Road, Southsea, Portsmouth, PO4 9DA

Mutado Pintado & Jonathan Dryden Present: Poke A Hole Let It Flow - LP

LP £15
Here I sit with a can in my hand, 
Carnation milk, the best in the land.
No tits to pull or shit to throw.
Just poke a hole and let it flow.
-Late Uncle Thomas Dennison.

137 & Times New Roman Records celebrate their first release with a limited edition 12" vinyl pressing, featuring music from Jonathan Dryden and Mutado Pintado Aka: Clams Baker of Warmduscher and Paranoid London.