Shark

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Shark is a story about the dispossessed and how they get by. Ex-soldier and violent deadbeat John Usher returns to his boyhood home of Leeds to find things have changed. His community has been unravelled by gang culture, ethnic tensions and hopelessness. Unable to sleep, his only consolation is drinking late into the night and playing pool by himself. That is, until an encounter with a hard right activist leads him into a twisted relationship of deceit, cuckoldry and hatred.
Here we have that rare artefact. A contemporary, regional, working class novel written with the ideas-based, language-grounded currency of the great transatlantic stylists: Updike, Bellow, De Lillo and Martin Amis. Wes Brown’s art is to match high literary intensity to the milieu of the northern pubs and Pool Halls, finding the story in a young man’s struggle to accommodate himself to the life he has been dealt, after service in Iraq, in a community divided and adrift. -Danny Broderick, The Workroom.