2002: Hayley
Even though your vision was blurred you could see it was Hayley steaming towards the lads as fast as she could, her school skirt flipping up and down as she ran. She crossed the playground in the blink of an eye, and without even breaking stride she kicked the lad who’d hit you so hard in the nuts with her cherry red Doc Marten that both his feet came off the ground before he crumpled to the turf, gasping for breath and making a disgusting retching noise like he was drowning or choking to death. The other lad looked on in silence, mouth agape, until Hayley caught his eye and feinted towards him, then he turned and ran like fuck, leaving his mate there bawling his eyes out on the grass.
Read our third extract from Stu Hennigan‘s novel in progress, False Friend.
False Friend: When Reality Kicked Down the Door
He was pissed when I met him, and he hasn’t changed a bit. This used to be playful, grinned out with an affectionate bash on the arm or tousle of his spiky hair, but after a time it came through gritted teeth, accompanied by a tight smile and a sidelong glance aimed like a bullet while she exhaled a slow sigh, heavy with the weariness of the world and every sad thing in it. According to legend, from the moment they met that night they had only eyes for each other, sitting across the table locked in deep conversation to the exclusion of everyone else until the bar staff kicked them all out some time after last orders, although Sean could have been dancing bollock naked on the table for all he could recall.
Read our second extract from Stu Hennigan‘s wonderful novel in progress, False Friend.
False Friend: 2016
The first retch stirs him. A spasm in the stomach, a tensing of the abdominal muscles, a slight twitch in the shoulders. The flicker of a gummy eyelid, nothing more.
The next one he feels; an acid burn in the back of the throat, body jerking as if from a minor electric shock, then yellow-green bile hits the tastebuds at the back of his tongue, synapses pop like infinite fireworks and billions of neurons race to his brain to flash their warnings that all is far from well.
Another heave and
he’s conscious
Read our first extract from Stu Hennigan‘s work in progress, False Friend.
The Novels: An Interview with Mark de Silva
Everything hangs on the meaning of “philosophy.” If philosophy’s a practice that consists in the adjudication, tacit or otherwise, of quite general propositions about reality’s nature, then Square Wave isn’t really a philosophical novel. But if philosophy needn’t involve authorial assertion, and can instead consist simply in the prolonged dwelling within the realm of such propositions—that is, within the conceptual (and not just sensory) imagination—then yes, the book is, among other things, a philosophical novel.
Daniel Davis Wood interviews Mark de Silva about his novels, The Logos and Square Wave.