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‘We got a McDonald’s the night my mam got lung cancer.’
As a distraction from sleazy male admirers, spiteful classmates and her mother’s cancer, Eve’s eyes are opened to a multicolour life of one-night stands, drug-fuelled discos and cheap booze. She barely has time to notice the reclusive, obsessive-compulsive Adam. Adam, however, notices Eve.
Narrated alternately by Adam and Eve alongside a cast of delinquents, foetuses and butterflies, Apples is an exploration of the sickly-sweet turmoil of growing up and the hazards of getting ‘fucked as quick as you can’.
First published in 2007 and reissued now by White Rabbit, Apples arrived like a meteor on the literary landscape with Milward barely out of his teenage years.
As a distraction from sleazy male admirers, spiteful classmates and her mother’s cancer, Eve’s eyes are opened to a multicolour life of one-night stands, drug-fuelled discos and cheap booze. She barely has time to notice the reclusive, obsessive-compulsive Adam. Adam, however, notices Eve.
Narrated alternately by Adam and Eve alongside a cast of delinquents, foetuses and butterflies, Apples is an exploration of the sickly-sweet turmoil of growing up and the hazards of getting ‘fucked as quick as you can’.
First published in 2007 and reissued now by White Rabbit, Apples arrived like a meteor on the literary landscape with Milward barely out of his teenage years.
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Reviews
Funny, tragic and transcendent. If you were ever a teenager, read it
A retelling of Paradise Lost set on a Middlesbrough housing estate. Apples is... experimental, fearless, funny and frightening
An astonishing debut . . . Catcher in the Rye meets the Arctic Monkeys
If this terrifyingly talented author really does have his finger on the pulse of today's youth, parents should probably just give up right now
Dazzling . . . I loved Apples . . . If I were an adolescent, I'd read and re-read [it] until it fell apart
If Bret Easton Ellis had grown up in a North of England housing project, Less Than Zero might have looked a bit like Apples. It's one of the best books I've ever read about being young, working-class and British
Crass, graphic, funny and unnerving . . . well constructed and streaming with gorgeous language, it's a frighteningly recognisable glimpse into a particular experience of adolescence
Richard Milward's no-holds-barred debut is the story of a boy named Adam and a girl named Eve . . . alongside chapters told by Adam and Eve are esoteric interludes where the narrator is a butterfly or an unborn baby, and each time Milward acquits himself brilliantly... Apples is an electrifying book, as frightening as it is funny, full of words that will have you running to urbandictionary.com, before cunningly using them in your own everyday speech