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Hope for Newborns

This novel was the starting point for what has become the central theme of my work in the years since, in my fiction, non-fiction and academic writing. Exploring the themes of doubt and conflicting truth, the novel is a fake biography of a young man working in a barber shop in Manchester who becomes involved in an online charity called Hope for Newborns, which later turns out to be fake. He also falls in love, online, with ‘Christy Columbus’ – this is the online name of the ‘revolutionary’ who is running the website. The love also turns out to be unreal. Exploring themes of national identity, sexuality and deception, the novel seeks to tell several alternative stories of the young man’s life, leading the reader to question which is the definitive version, if indeed there was one at all. The novel was my first reply to the works of David Peace and Gordon Burn, the writers at the forefront of the British novelists’ movement urging ‘faction’, a mix of fiction and fact, as the most effective way for the novel form to operate in the 21st century.