Wreckage - Softcover

Griffiths, Niall

3.63

124 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974414 ISBN 13: 9781555974411

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2006

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"[Wreckage] is a really remarkable piece of work. In the foreground is a caper story; in the background, a poetically expressed, apocalyptic history of Liverpool." ―The Daily Telegraph

That woman with the grey hair and the specs and the kind face and the accent all like his grandmother, his nain in hospital and when she can talk that is what she sounds like. Don'thitmepleasedon'thitme. These women falling, sliding off this earth and not just from violence but the one commonality that turns life to a wreck―age.

After their botched and brutal mission to punish a one-armed man in a small Welsh village, Darren and Alastair head back to Liverpool to report to their mob boss. On the way home, Darren robs a rural postal office in Wales that serves as a bank and needlessly cracks the skull of a little old postal lady. Darren's eyes are full of fire. "We're rich, Alastair!" But Alastair sees his own nain in this elderly woman and falls victim to his conscience. Darren has finally gone too far.

As Alastair and Darren weave their way through the lowlife milieu of Liverpool, we hear many voices: the alky, the crack addict, the busman, the whores, the gangsters, and Darren's many victims. But we also hear the voices of their ancestors going back generations of unthinkable grief and poverty.

A fascinating sequel to Niall Griffiths' Stump, which Irvine Welsh calls "a magnificent novel of loss and obsession . . . [by] a major talent."

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About the Author:

Born in Liverpool in 1966, Niall Griffiths now lives in Wales. He has published five novels. Kelly + Victor and Stump are currently being filmed for television.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this follow-up to his 2005 novel Stump, Griffiths again offers a vision of Liverpool and its inhabitants, doing for the city what Joyce did for Dublin, albeit more violently. Darren and Alastair, two Liverpudlian thugs, rob a post office in a small village in Wales. Darren bludgeons the old lady postmaster within an inch of her life while Alastair weakly protests, and the pair makes off with four thousand pounds in cash. Greedy and fed up with his psychopathic partner, Alastair conscripts two younger thugs to help him steal the four thousand pounds from Darren. Of course, they take all the money for themselves, leaving both Darren and Alastair unconscious and bleeding on the wet sidewalk. When they come to, they're broke, in deep trouble with mob boss Tommy, and responsible for a crime that has drawn the attention and disgust of the entire U.K. The story is told in rotating narratives that offer the voices (in varying degrees of dialect) of nearly every character that crosses paths with Darren and Alastair, including their victims, a whore, a drunk and a pompous poet. Though the plot turns on drugs and violence, Griffith's lyrical and funny prose inoculates him against any charge that he's merely following the path that Trainspotting cut for British novelists who don't write about London.
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