Bobby, holed up in a Middlesbrough tower block, works on his paintings under the influence of pills-on-toast, acid-on-crackers and Francis Bacon. When Bent Lewis, a famous art dealer and mover-shaker from that London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a sweaty adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence involving a 2.5cm-head curved claw hammer.

Spanning one dynamite paragraph, Ten Storey Love Song is a ferocious slab of concrete prose peppered with beauty and delivered with glorious abandon.