Andrew McMillan’s debut poetry collection physical, an explicit yet tender study of masculinity in the post-industrial north of England, was a thrilling paean to young queer male experience in the noughties. In 2015 it became the first poetry collection to win the Guardian first book award; its successor, playtime, took the inaugural Polari prize for LGBTQ+ literature and was followed in 2021 by pandemonium.
McMillan has now harnessed his considerable talent to writing a novel. Pity, appearing 40 years after the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which convulsed parts of the UK and divided working-class communities, draws on three generations of men from the same family whose lives have been dominated by the local pit – closed since the end of the strike – near Barnsley in South Yorkshire, McMillan’s home town.
