Tom Benn

**Winner of the 2022 Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award****A Sunday Times Paperback of the Year****Longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger 2023****Longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022**‘Oxblood shows us that there are few places literature can’t take us, if the writer is brave enough, and gifted enough’ FRANCIS SPUFFORD'The master of northern noir' SUNDAY TIMES'Brilliant' DENISE MINA 'An absolute triumph' GUARDIAN'Powerful and so beautifully written' HARRIET TYCE, Sunday Times-bestselling author of BLOOD ORANGE________________________________________________________________Wythenshawe, South Manchester. 1985. The Dodds family once ruled Manchester’s underworld; now the men are dead, leaving three generations of women trapped in a house haunted by violence, harbouring an unregistered baby and the ghost of a murdered lover.Over the course of a few days, Nedra, Carol and Jan must each confront the true legacy of the men who have defined their lives; and seize the opportunity to break the cycle for good._______________________________________________________________‘If I read a better novel than Oxblood in 2022, it’ll be a blinding year for fiction’ JOSEPH KNOX'A propulsive, bountiful, fearless work of art' OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE'One of the most powerful and urgent writers of our times' DAVID PEACE

'A snapshot of what the crime novel is doing now and a glimpse of the directions it might take in the future' - Mick Herron'Crime fiction demands a flexible, sceptical framework for its own increasingly rude health. The eleven writers in this third MA Crime Fiction Anthology understand this. Irrespective of subject, setting, theme or prose style, each uses the multitudes of the crime genre to embrace and reflect who we are and how we live now. Each understands and respects the genre, even as they dismantle its traditions' - Tom Benn'The creative writing workshop is an environment that is built upon freedom, but also support. It's almost too magical a place, too idyllic, too democratic, too truthful. But I don't believe in magic, any more than I believe in the muse. What has happened in this space, which is ever expanding, over the last couple of years, has been an outpouring of talent and determination, by eleven extraordinary writers' - Henry SuttonFeaturing work by: Laura Ashton • Judi Daykin • Antony Dunford • Jayne Farnworth • Natasha Hutcheson • Louise Mangos • Elizabeth Saccente • Matthew Smith • Karen Taylor • Wendy Turbin • Bridget Walsh

Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year AwardIt's Manchester, at the close of the millennium, and Henry Bane is now manager of an exclusive nightclub. He has a beautiful mistress, a teenage son, and is making moves in a violent underworld to which he is increasingly numbed.When a young girl is found tortured and unwilling to go to the police, Bane offers to help, and finds horror in a feral community with a respectable veneer. But, by meddling, he ends up endangering those he wants to protect. Not only that, he also manages to incur the wrath of an ailing ganglord, and soon finds himself tangled in a penthouse robbery and an underground boxing match.Trouble Man takes Bane through a hell, perhaps of his own making, where he is pushed to his limit - and the trouble only gets closer to home.

Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year AwardIt's Manchester, 1998, and the funeral party for Henry Bane's father is interrupted by a woman from Bane's past. Róisín is back in his life after an eight-year absence, inconvenient for Jan, his latest flame. Róisín has brought a wounded boyfriend with her - and a lot more trouble is following them up north.Meanwhile, a Yardie who goes by the name of 'Hagfish' wants to take over the local ganglords' territory with Mary, his terrifying weapon of choice. It's Hagfish against Bane in a new turf war: a war that will claim lives and cement vendettas. It's a conflict steeped in half-forgotten history: a history that Bane and Róisín are forever tied to - and which ties them together.

Winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year AwardIt's Manchester, July 1996, the month after the IRA bomb, and the Evening News is carrying reports of two murders. On the front page is a glamorous Egyptian woman, a socialite and heiress to an oil fortune, whose partially clothed body has been found in a basement. In the back pages there is a fifty-word piece on the murder of a young prostitute found dumped on a roadside.For Henry Bane, fixer, loanshark and legman for one of Manchester's established ganglords, it's the second piece of news that hits hardest. Determined to find out what happened to his childhood sweetheart he searches his bombed city for answers, finding that these two stories belong on the same page, and that Bane's world belongs to others - those willing to profit from guns, human trafficking and a Manchester in decay.