Stewkey Blues

D. J. Taylor has written thirteen novels, including Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and three volumes of short stories, most recently Stewkey Blues (2022) which won the Fiction Award in the 2022 East Anglian Book Awards. His non-fiction includes Orwell: The Life, which won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography, and its successor, Orwell: The New Life (2023). He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.

Famed though it is for its flatness, Norfolk is a county of manifold aspects, many of which are captured in these sharp, subtle new stories by native son DJ Taylor. They all emerged from 2020’s lockdown, and together delineate the region’s geographical and social range, occasionally squinting back in time and tuning in to mythical echoes.