Wounds

A delightful and illuminating book. -- John Whitley * Sunday Times *
Maureen Duffy is one of Britain's foremost writers. * The Guardian *
With Wounds [Maureen Duffy] injects into her writing a bitter and convincing compassion. The book is a macroscopic view of south London people, ordinary working class lives which come across with a reality so well defined that the act of reading is likely to send the reader into the middle of Clapham Common or Brockwell Park. People die, accept their inadequacies, express their eccentricities. There is dotty Kingy, a 'poor dusthole fairy', who forces the world to fit her own view, and suffers for it; the West Indian mother, whose demotic speech Miss Duffy catches with great skill, and her son, the archetypal misfit who seeks solace from a theatrical queer knowing that in the end he'll never make it. -- Barry Cole * Spectator *
The relationships form haphazardly, in working hours: at Maura's pub, mostly, or on the paper round. Only the reader is priveliged to see the jigsaw fit together, deepening their mutual understanding. And the prose matches this, choosing similes that are both powerful and apt, making the whole narrative colourful and poetic. It is a delightful and illuminating book. -- John Whitley * Sunday Times *