Advertisement for a live recording of the Working Class Library podcast at Hexham Book Festival at 7.30pm on Saturday 25th April
In this live recording for the Working Class Library podcast Val McDermid will be talking to hosts @clairemalcolm.bsky.social and Richard Benson about the Scottish crime novel that most inspired her – William McIlvanney's Laidlaw. See you there!
www.hexhambookfestival.co.uk/event/the-wo...
All in all, an oustanding achievement that should be on plenty of best-of-the-year lists come the autumn.
The resulting feelings of aggressive displacement have been insufficiently documented. Keshed not only documents them, it articulates why those feelings are more than just nostalgia.
There's so much more to the novel than that, but that idea stuck with me long after I'd finished.
In recent years, our industrial cities – none more so than Leeds – have been built over with shopping centres and high-rise apartment blocks that are unaffordable to the people who used to live there.
Hennigan’s ability to connect the lone person with the social context explains the praise from publications like the Times Literary Supplement.
the relationship with his family, which buckled under the pressures of capitalism. It’s about an individual who struggled after as the first in his family to have gone into higher education. Behind that, it’s the story of the disappearing social structures that held working-class lives together.
Keshed, his first novel, is part experimental fiction, part kitchen-sink romance, part addiction story – and a unique account of the unmaking of the British working class.
It tells the story of a dying man reviewing the wreckage of his past life and...
Hennigan grew up in a working-class Yorkshire family, and lives in Leeds. He’ll be known to many readers as the author of Ghost Signs, a lauded memoir about his time delivering food parcels during the pandemic
The jacket of Stu Hennigan's novel Keshed
It took a while to digest Keshed by @stuhennigan.bsky.social , because it's such a big, powerful and important novel.
Apart from anything else, it brings home how xlass works on you internally and externally, a combination of feeling and material conditions.
Yes absolutely.
And lots of the Reform party’s actual policies are expensive throwbacks to big protectionist state policies from the 50s-70s period - while also promising spending cuts of course.
Fair enough but some EU countries have had neoliberal policies. The original question tho was whether there was evidence to say neoliberalism leads to fascism generally, not just in the US. I can see how that argument makes sense there .
You could make an argument that European neoliberalism has spurred the hard right in that it allows parties to play to an older demographic’s memories of bigger, more protective states. That happens (in different ways) in Hungary and the UK for example. Tho the uk hasn’t had a fascist government.
If we can take a nation state at the basic unit we’re measuring, would you count both an elected government and the presence of fascist activists as examples of state being fascist?
If you were looking for evidence that neoliberalism necessarily leads to fascism, wouldn’t you need more examples?
Intetesting read, thank you. Always good to see that despite all the theorising that goes around around social media etc, old fashioned word of mouth still works
I sometimes wonder if, when someone finds an old coin, say a Roman one, are they first person to touch it since the last Roman person it? Is there a corresponding Roman person 2000 years ago going “Damn, I’ve lost that sodding aureus.”?
Reading this has been like someone turning a light on, as I just haven’t been able to understand how my daughter’s university reading works. Thank you.
How would one show original thinking in, say, physics though? Most exams reward memory and certain ways of thinking, which is why so many intelligent people fail them.
I genuinely don’t understand the logic of this response. Surely firing missiles is not a threat but an action?
Not enough books about darts. Thank you Kit Fielding, I’m going in 🎯
You’s be welcome over at the Bee Gayla 🐝🐝🐝🐝
Admission to this online event is free, and you’re hereby invited. To obtain your ticket and a link via Eventbrite, see link here
We can’t wait to meet you there, at this our first online event! Do please swarm along 🐝 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launc...
The Bee is hosting an online launch event for Chopsy, with @clairemalcolm, publisher of The Bee and CEO of New Writing North, in conversation with Maya Jordan, and questions from the audience to follow. The event takes place at 7.30pm on Wednesday 25 March 2026.
Very pleased to read this Vicky
Author Natasha Carthew with her quote "Social Class is one of the biggest barriers to getting by and getting on, not just in Britain but around the world, and if someone tells you it doesn’t matter, those are the people who need to know that it has never mattered more. "
I will not lie, it was new to me.
Growing up in a working-class family in Newcastle, David Olusoga experience devastating economic decline, and racism. Yet he "rejected his rejection", and has come to love his home region, as he explain in an essay in The Bee:
thebeemagazine.com/david-olusog...
For the Bee he's written Sticker Upper, a short story set in Cardiff in the late 90s. It is a terrific evocation of time /place, and a depiction of the challenges of young manhood. And it’s a reminder that not everyone spent the 1990s drinking cappuccino and/or listening to Britpop in Camden.
