Oxblood: Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award

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Tom Benn certainly reveals the very darkest side of working class life on the estate but does so with writing that is engaging and beautiful, even when describing the depths to which humanity can sink. My father was a police constable who was stationed at Longsight (and, for a time, at Benchill) and so, even though he would never have shared the reality of his job over the dinner table, as a teenager in the 60's I was savvy enough to sense some of what he was experiencing. Occasionally he would return home with his hand in plaster, after helping to beat a drunken Irishman into his cell.

A remarkable galvanization of a time and a place, its style and substance so rooted in one another it is impossible to imagine it being written by anyone else. A story that seeps into you, sentences turned to catch the light like night eyes. A living thing' -- DOMINIC NOLAN The Charlotte Aitken Trust would like to thank the judges of this year’s award for producing such an outstanding shortlist. It is a showcase for the vitality and range of talent in a younger generation. Tom Benn’s novel Oxblood is a worthy winner, though the prize could have gone to any of the shortlist — which must have made the judges’ task especially hard. We warmly congratulate all four authors and look forward to watching their careers blossom.‘ Once she is involved with the team though, bad things start happening and some in the team start suspecting she might be a mole, but who the real mole was will surprise them all.I was drawn to this novel simply by the fact that it is set in the Wythenshawe and Manchester of the 60's, 70's and 80's that I grew up in and where my paternal grandparents lived. There's a fascination in reading fiction that references places that we know. With that said, I enjoyed the story overall. I think it had a good amount of suspense and a few twists that I didn’t see coming, which was fun. Victoria is such a cool character, with her ability to adapt to situations, and I like that her skill in observation came in handy in her search for her brother. I hope that she grows more as the series continues and is able to get past the aren’t-I-such-a-sad-baby thing, because while she certainly has it tough, she also certainly loves lamenting over the fact that her life is tough. This one wasn’t a must-read for me, but I definitely can see people loving it for its constant stream of surprises.

As she starts to work with the team and gets to know all of them, we see her start to grow confidence, as well as feeling like she is a part of something and helping. I loved how the whole team worked together yet, was each an individual as well. They are their own little family that will do anything to protect one another. To me, genres are ever-evolving narrative frameworks that expose our fears and fantasies, offering writers trenchant tools to interrogate, repurpose and vandalise. We might turn to genre for comfort: to escape the tedium, uncertainty and injustice of reality; but genre can also confront these horrors, directly or askance, and say something troubling and truthful about them. What projects are you working on? Tom Benn is one of publishing’s best kept secrets. His story about the struggles of three generations of women in a Manchester crime clan has been rendered with such care and specificity that it feels wholly original. The result is a rich, dark, atmospheric family saga that contains so much buried love and anger and grief and sexual jealousy and bitter disappointment. In fact, it’s one of the best contemporary novels about disappointment that I have ever read. Yet somehow I emerged from it exhilarated! I’m thrilled that we are rewarding a young writer who has been working below the radar for a while and is now finally getting the attention he deserves.‘The story covers a few days and also a few decades, which is handled masterfully. The parallels are so subtle that I’m only now working some of them out. There’s filth and misery, but there’s a lot of warmth and support too. And then there is Jan - the teenage tearaway running as fast as she can from her mother, her grandmother, and her own unnamed baby. Every now and then I might hear him discussing his shift with my mother, always when they thought I was out of earshot. Tales of drunkenness, beatings, petty crime. My only disappointment was with how much was left unexplained at the end. In the finale, one character was not where he was supposed to be, but we never find out why. Another was essentially captured but somehow still got away. Okay, but how? I read the Advanced Reader (unfinished) version of the book, so maybe the final version fills in these blanks.

This is her first clue that her brother is in much more trouble than she realized. What has he done that has captured the attention of Interpol? And where is he? His writing style is raw, powerful, and all the other descriptions in the quotes on the cover, but it was always (for me) comprehensible. I did look up a few of the dialect words. His unconventional use of punctuation didn’t throw me like Evaristo’s, though. It is always clear what is going on and why he has chosen to break lines up etc. Wythenshawe, South Manchester. 1985. The Dodds family once ruled Manchester's underworld; now the men are dead, leaving three generations of women trapped in a house haunted by violence, harbouring an unregistered baby and the ghost of a murdered lover. Victoria is a young woman who is working at a diner and has no real idea what she wants to do with her life. So instead she uses her brother going to law school as a reason for not going to school and furthering her education. While her brother is away in Italy for school, her and her best friend have end up living together with the occasional stop in from her Vic’s freeloading boyfriend. I loved Vic’s best friend and how she helped her not be so uptight about thing sometimes. We all need a person like that in our lives. As for the freeloading boyfriend he needs to go, and I was so happy when Vic finally stood up to him. Train me. Put me to the test. If I fail miserably, you can send me home. But don't sentence me to a life of worry without at least giving me a chance. I know I can do this."

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Tom Benn writes well about women and their lives, the changing attitudes towards them and their expectations of life from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, and by implication, the contrast with the present day. All his characters are nuanced and he evokes some sympathy for even the worst behaved of them.

I recognised a lot of this description of the ‘80s while, at the same time, the life described in it is very different from what my own was at the time. This is the tale of three women of different generations in the same family, the youngest being roughly contemporaneous with me. Teenage girls, even more than now, were seen as appropriate sex objects then. You either had to veer away from it (as I did, hiding myself in oversized men’s suits and scary goth makeup) or lean into it, as love-starved Jan does here.

To witness the mid-meal apocalypse: James Ellroy, Ishmael Reed, Zora Neale Hurston, Blaise Cendrars, Begum Rokeya, Marco Vassi, Alan Moore and Anna Kavan. The best and worst things about where you live? She's really worried, so off to Italy she flies. Starting with the last hotel that he stayed in, she starts asking questions. To her surprise, she's greeted by a good looking man .. pointing a gun at her. Seems like he's looking for her brother, as well.