Skin And Bone

Introducing a powerful new voice to British fiction, a novel which dissects the social and erotic tensions at large in a small northern town.

Gareth Creer grew up in Manchester and spent eight years working in the City.  He gave up a lucrative career to commit himself to writing fulltime.  He took the MA in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam, and since October 1999  has been Writer in Residence at Leicester Prison in the Young Offenders unit. He is now also the Lecturer in Creative Writing at John Moore's University in Liverpool.  He is the author of three novels, Skin and Bone, Cradle to Grave and Big Sky.

Artie lives in Slipp - a tawdry, urban setting, a mixture of big estates and what's left of the old town. When his father died, he inherited the family fishmongers on the High Street. He could have hauled himself out of Slipp, gone to college, were it not for looking after his mum. Artie is a good-looking guy. He's married to the gorgeous, middle-class, university-educated Madelaine, who he's known since school. She is confident and independent and works in the theatre. 
 
There are two big estates in Slipp at war with each other, and tensions rise as Artie gets caught up in a ugly brawl in a pub leaves the brother of one of Slipp's hard men maimed, setting off a grim and threatening chain of events. 
 
Artie's main obsession of late is that his wife is having an affair. For some time he has been collecting evidence to trap her. He rifles her handbag, looking for telephone numbers, unfamiliar names, he inspects her underwear for signs of illicit sex, and tries to second-guess what she might be doing to cover her tracks. Gradually a picture of his paranoia begins to emerge, but equally Madelaine's behaviour is questionable. 
 
When Artie becomes convinced that Madelaine's affair is with the local property developer, who wants Artie out of the shop, he takes matters into his own hands and as the tension of these two parallel obsessions tightens, Artie brings about his own, dramatic resolutions. 
 
'Shocking and grimly funny... This is a book soaked in disquieting atmosphere and threaded with thrillerish tension. It is erotic; brutal in its portrayal of urban squalor and poverty; sparky and pacey. A sharp novel with a vivid contemporary feel' Lesley Glaister

Cradle To Grave

A hard-hitting, metropolitan novel which explores the ordeals of the single, working mother within the context of a darker, London underworld.

Annie is a single, working mother. She had made it to the top of her career playing the markets in the City, but since Percy was born, her marriage to a successful West End lawyer already over after she discovered he was having an affair during her pregnancy, she has found it harder and harder to cope. Strung-out and post-natally depressed she has been summarily sacked from her high-powered job, her once impressive career down-sized to a job in a high street estate agents. Feeling totally inadequate as a mother, torn by guilt at not spending more time with her son and by the need to earn money and maintain a career of some sort, Annie is struggling to keep sane. 
 
Then one morning, peering out of the office window, she sees a couple: a young woman with a baby Percy's age, apparently the very model of mother and child, and a guy - black, handsome, detached-looking. Annie is curious about them: attracted to the woman by her naturalness with her child, and to the man by his sexual allure. But when he comes into the office asking about studios to rent, Annie starts to move, semi-consciously, down a path that will lead her into a much darker world than she could ever have imagined, a world that will threaten her very freedom, but which will throw into sharp relief the things of value in her life. 
 
Through his remarkably perceptive portrait of Annie, Gareth Creer explores the realities facing single working mothers today but into her story he skilfully weaves a pacey thriller that tips the balance over from the everyday into a sinister, unfamiliar, subterranean world

Gareth Creer

'A well-paced, ambitious crime novel, handled with sensitivity'

'Ambitious and, in terms of British crime writing, original. It escapes the leaden plotting and ingratiating rhetoric of much hard-case literature'

'Like Ian Rankin, he readily combines bleakness with extraordinary compassion; like Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler, he operates in a world where justice is not always the province of the law; and, like James Ellroy, he can endow the most extreme acts of retribution with poetic resonance. Yet the voice is absolutely his own'

'Jimmy Mack . . . is the eloquent narrator of Gareth Creer's third novel and, to a familiar story of big money, death and deception, he brings a strange poetry . . . this is a curious novel, and perhaps rare for the genre in its sensitivity, merging as it does the romanticism of crime with a wonder for the world about us'

'Amid the devilish plot twists Creer makes room to flesh out his principals most satisfyingly, and establish a page-blurring pace which he underpins with a unique and oddly lush economy of language'

'In spite of its savage background, Creer's novel is rumbustiously entertaining . . . partly because Jimmy is an engaging and strangely innocent hero, and partly because of Creer's heady, Burgess-meets-Berkoff prose'

'Creer's sensitive and poised writing lifts the novel into a class of its own, closer to vintage Martin Amis than Rancid Aluminum . . . exquisitely raw in tone, with a sparse and timeless beauty'

Big Sky is narrated by a mute called Jimmy Mack. A good man who has to do bad things, he has spent his childhood in and out of children's homes. A kind of benign Fagin figure, he is the head of a family of similarly disaffected youths living on the North-East English coast. Surviving on a diet of petty crime, life is sweet enough until a bungled drug scam designed to rake in enough cash to set them up in Spain puts Jimmy perilously into the hands of Flint, the local mafia boss - and a woman. The pay off for trying to get a piece of the big time is that Flint dispatches them to Holland to deal with some unfinished business. And for the first time Jimmy finds that he is no longer in control. 
 
Seen through the eyes of the mild and likeable Jimmy, the action - some of it violent - is refracted through the lens of his own complicated past, and gradually a picture builds of a man who is desperate to find a sense of belonging. Shrugging off the conventions of countless drug-deal-gone-bad thrillers, Big Sky combines a seductive, almost poetic prose with a thrilling and utterly believable plot that drives the novel to its optimistic conclusion. 
 
'In spite of its savage background, Creer's novel is rumbustiously entertaining . . . partly because Jimmy is an engaging and strangely innocent hero, and partly because of Creer's heady, Burgess-meets-Berkoff prose' Ross Gilfillan, Daily Mail 
 
'Amid the devilish plot twists Creer makes room to flesh out his principals most satisfyingly, and establish a page-blurring pace which he underpins with a unique and oddly lush economy of language' Chris Power, The Times 
 
'Jimmy Mack . . . is the eloquent narrator of Gareth Creer's third novel and, to a familiar story of big money, death and deception, he brings a strange poetry . . . this is a curious novel, and perhaps rare for the genre in its sensitivity, merging as it does the romanticism of crime with a wonder for the world about us' James Hopkin, The Times

Gareth Creer

Praise for Big Sky

'A well-paced, ambitious crime novel, handled with sensitivity'

'Ambitious and, in terms of British crime writing, original. It escapes the leaden plotting and ingratiating rhetoric of much hard-case literature'

'Like Ian Rankin, he readily combines bleakness with extraordinary compassion; like Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler, he operates in a world where justice is not always the province of the law; and, like James El ...

'A well-paced, ambitious crime novel, handled with sensitivity'

'Ambitious and, in terms of British crime writing, original. It escapes the leaden plotting and ingratiating rhetoric of much hard-case literature'

'Like Ian Rankin, he readily combines bleakness with extraordinary compassion; like Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler, he operates in a world where justice is not always the province of the law; and, like James El ...

'A well-paced, ambitious crime novel, handled with sensitivity'

'Ambitious and, in terms of British crime writing, original. It escapes the leaden plotting and ingratiating rhetoric of much hard-case literature'

'Like Ian Rankin, he readily combines bleakness with extraordinary compassion; like Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler, he operates in a world where justice is not always the province of the law; and, like James El ...

Books by Gareth Creer

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