Broken Ghost

Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths's exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what's going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply intelligent Broken Ghost, combines myth, drug culture and iconoclastic political vision in a wild music that's also a call to arms. This important book outstrips even its own virtuoso literary technique. -- Fiona Sampson * New Statesman, *Books of the Year* * A Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time... what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights...This important novel comes from a tradition: from the green fuse of Dylan Thomas...The result, though, is something new, a profane, passionate response to nature and to the countryside, which is rarely encountered in contemporary British fiction any more. * Guardian * This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page. -- Stephanie Cross * Daily Mail * Niall Griffiths has, like Kelman, crafted a sophisticated literary voice for the kind of people routinely dismissed not even as old-school proletarians but as a worthless feral underclass ... It rewards us with soaring lyricism, the bite and drive of its vernacular voices, and the recurrent search for something transcendent in natural beauty, in human love, in the rapture of consciousness itself, in the ancient rhythms and cycles of the land. * The Arts Desk * Pairing Irvine Welsh's demotic vim with the conspiratorial frisson of a David Peace novel, Broken Ghost is strange and compelling. * Observer *