Sometimes you need to leave a place before you can write about it, and Colwill Brown’s Doncaster from the late 90s to 2015 is that place. This lacerating, exhilarating debut novel, written almost entirely in South Yorkshire dialect, spans nearly 20 years in the lives of its protagonists Kel, Shaz and Rach, from the Spice Girls to the drug spice. It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will probably read nothing else like it this year.
“Remember when we thought Donny wut whole world? Before we knew we wa Northern, when we seemed to be central, when we carved countries out ut farmers’ fields, biking through neck-high rapeseed, cutting tracks … ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke, or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” The novel begins as a chorus, musing and retrospective, forcefully acerbic. Each chapter relays a separate, nonlinear, intensely involving incident. Sometimes a rueful, omniscient plural “we” is used; more often second- and first-person narratives spill out from one of the trio. In one chapter the girls’ names are changed to the characters they play in a school production of Romeo and Juliet, without identifying who is who.
