A heart-stopping and head-scratching dizzying array of voices and timelines, submerged in pain, addiction and desperation. In dense, chapter-length paragraphs the language clashes and trembles with unremitting bleakness. An uncomfortable howl of defiance from the neglected, abused and voiceless, but despite the gritty storyline, the language is almost musical and the story mesmerising.
The thing that drove me mad, the thing that pulled me out of my childishly straightforward, simple existence, out of my wits, was the realisation – at first diffuse, covert and inexplicable, before becoming a revelation and then a kind of experience, a somatically and intellectually couched understanding – that some lives don’t deserve to be lived. That this lie prevails. And no one can do anything about it.
