Author:Joe Stretch
Life in Manchester is sexy and stinking. Hold your breath. Justin wants a sex life, not a sex death. Rebecca has breasts but doesn't understand them. She needs to talk to Dostoevsky about erections, hairy armpits and firing squads. Life is difficult. Steve wants cash so he can enjoy his trendy body. He wants Carly too, but she just wants a never-ending orgasm. Johnny wants to be touched and, if possible, he'd like to seem happy. Colin wants to know why tits make his fists clench.
This is their story. They try their best. They drag their feet through the fashions, the foul, the famous and the drunk of twenty-first century Britain. They're looking for happiness. What they find is friction.
Joe Stretch is such an original writer it's pointless to compare him to anyone, yet his black humour, sardonic tone and sheer readability suggest that Anthony Burgess is alive and well and still living in Manchester. This is A Clockwork Orange for the 21st century
—— Nicholas RoyleLike Houellebecq for generation WHY
—— Ewan MorrisonRaw, wild, aflame with ideas, Friction will bring a cure-or-kill medicinal shock to our post-boom hangover
—— Boyd Tonkin , IndependentTransports the dystopian sexuality of Michel Houellebecq to the throbbing bars of Manchester, where a gaggle of characters numb their morality in pursuit of the ultimate orgasm. Satirically imagining a bleakly banal world of rampant consumerism and pregnancy as the final, putrid fetish, Friction snarls, spits and crackles like an anti Sex and the City or Kafka with cum-shots
—— ID magazineA sharp and intense world created by a radical new writer
—— Xiaolu GuoVicious, funny and disturbingly honest, Friction is a fine debut from an assured new writer
—— New StatesmanClever, savvy, licentious and macabrely funny with it
—— Manchester Evening NewsA caustic comedy, and doesn't mark the arrival of a new provocateur but of a promising satirist
—— Independent on SundayJoe Stretch takes no prisoners with this debut, presenting a distorted reflection of 21st century Britain that's as black as it is bracing... Friction succeeds as a highly charged vision of modern society's moral decline - it's a novel that may well achieve the cult status it's striving for
—— MetroFriction is a bellow of rage and disgust at the eagerness with which the 21st century soul attenuates itself. That this trivia-obsessed, pornography-fraught and digitised-to-death world that we have made for ourselves can produce such high art, and with such slicing satirical humour, is one of the central paradoxes, and causes for celebration, of our age
—— Niall GriffithsNeill bucks the chick-lit trend with prose that's clever and endearing, and frazzled parents will love the way she nails the sticky, hair-pulling mania of domestic life
—— Washington PostA deftly executed domestic comedy
—— Boston GlobeHilarious . . . Plays with the chaos and comedy of 30-something metropolitan maternity and brings it to an unexpectedly moving conclusion
—— Anna Wintour , Vogue
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