Dogknife

A coming-of-age crime novel set in Nottingham.
Gizmo is seventeen, street-wise, and already out of chances.

Kicked out of home and dumped in a Nottingham hostel for troubled teenagers, she learns fast that survival comes before rules. Alongside Boo-Boo Girl and the volatile Val, Gizmo drifts into a world of drugs, alcohol, and the Forest Road red-light district — chasing freedom, money, and a sense of control in a city that offers none.

When Boo Boo Girl is brutally attacked and the justice system turns its back on her, something in Gizmo snaps. Armed with nothing but her Dogknife and a fierce, unshakable sense of right and wrong, she sets out on a path of revenge that drags her from the streets into young offenders’ institutions and the relentless machinery of violence.

Told entirely in Gizmo’s raw, slang-heavy voice, Dogknife is a gritty, unflinching coming-of-age crime novel set in late-90s Nottingham — a city on the brink, where loyalty is survival, justice is fragile, and growing up can cost you everything.

Welcome to Nottingham. This is Dogknife.

Liam Rodgers is a 1999 Koestlar Award winner and has had material screened on Channel 4. Recently he was a finalist in the QUAD Short Film Commission with his short script, Redwood Runner and Long-listed in the BBC's Writer's Prize for his radio script, Riders. Having turned his own life around from one of crime, prison and drug abuse during his teenage years, Liam has concentrated his efforts into producing many dozens of songs, stories and pieces of art, often infecting his art with the social-realism of his own experiences. He has been in bands, ran a small production company, been a youth-worker, a street busker, a tree-protester, a cook and much more in a varied life-so-far. Liam is thirty-five, has two children, Niamh and Jupiter, and currently lives in Sheffield where he is studying a BA in Creative Writing.