Pity by Andrew McMillan
The town was once a hub of industry. A place where men toiled underground in darkness, picking and shovelling in the dust and the sleck. It was dangerous and back-breaking work but it meant something.
Once, the town provided, it was important, it had purpose. But what is it now?
Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the town where their father lived and his father, too. Still reeling from the collapse of his personal life, Alex, is now in his middle age, and must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to mask.
Simon is the only child of Alex and had practically no memory of the mines. Now in his twenties and working in a call centre, he derives passion from his side hustle in sex work and his weekly drag gigs as the extravagant Puttana Short Dress.
Set across three generations of South Yorkshire mining family, Andrew McMillan's short and magnificent debut novel is a lament for a lost way of a life as well as a celebration of resilience and the possibility for change.
‘Tender and true. It explores with brilliance and deep empathy how our lives – and our secrets – are always intertwined with those who went before us’ - DOUGLAS STUART
‘Pity pays a great poet's tough but tender attention to the unspoken layers and historic fissures which lie beneath the wounded town of the self. This beautiful book about the marks that are left on people and places in turn leaves' - MAX PORTER
Hardback / 192 pages