FOSSILS

An unforgettable story of outrunning poverty through the power of stories and imagination.

In a neglected part of town beset with social problems, from unemployment and crime to inequalities of health and education, a twelve-year-old girl sees an opportunity to claim a new identity for herself.

Escaping her chaotic home life, Sherrie-Lee witnesses a bungled bank robbery and manipulates one of the failed robbers into taking her in. Alone and away from home she is free to be whoever she wants, inventing stories and personas to make sense of the seemingly random world she lives in. In her new freedom she finds a mixed sense of possibility and loneliness, along with a growing worry for her younger brother back home. But it’s not long before Sherrie-Lee’s deceits start catching up with her and she’s forced to flee once again.

Fossils expertly captures the powerless half-light of adolescence and the shaky existence of all who are lost.

Alison Armstrong is a writer of prose and plays. She grew up in the North of England and has worked as a cleaner, waitress, painter and teacher, as well as developing her writing career. She won a Northern Writers’ Award for short fiction in 2017, a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and an award from Arts Council England in 2021. Her poems, essays, and short stories have been published in magazines and journals. Fossils is her first book.