Hutchinson brings coffinfuls of black humour and foul-mouthed grisliness to his heartfelt portrait of working-class life in this comic debut novel . . . It's [the] vivid, painterly details that leap most memorably from the page . . . Poetic snapshots of street life manage to capture whole lives in single pieces of clothing. The evocation of gambling's sickening exhilaration is almost unbearably compulsive, and Hutchinson's ode to working-class life is serious and tender. His writing about Jamie's day job, too, is never less than rhapsodically funny.
