In life Brian Clough was never at a loss for words, and not even death has been sufficient to shut him up. Clough recently featured in Steven Lowe's play The Spirit of the Man at Nottingham Playhouse, and his starring role in David Peace's novel confirms that writers are queuing up to get inside the mind of Old Big 'Ead. Good job there's plenty of room. Peace has the good sense to realise that 300 pages of Clough in barrel-thumping mode would be fairly intolerable, and instead chooses to focus on the manager's ignominious 44-day tenure at Leeds United. The novel makes you wonder how it lasted quite that long. Clough loathed Leeds - he famously told the players they ought to throw their championship medals in the bin as they had been won unfairly - and his attempt to instil "a little bit more warmth, a little bit more honesty, a little bit more me" in a taciturn squad of cloggers was doomed from the outset. The story unfolds with the grim inevitability of hubris inviting humiliation - if Euripides had ever tried ghosting football memoirs he could not have done it better.
In the long hot summer of 1976, Evan, a would-be prog rock guitarist, is offered a job in a residential care-home. Though he doesn't feel particularly attractive in a navy nylon overall "which made a sad whistling sound whenever he moved", he meets the gawky gap-year student Adrea (without an "n") and their fate is sealed when their eyes meet over a bloated corpse. Broady depicts the elderly with just the right mixture of grotesquerie and compassion: "they followed in a line, gentle grey and wrinkled, holding on to each other's trailing stocking ends like circus elephants." But he's even better at evoking hot, sputum-flecked nights at London's Roundhouse, where Evan and Adrea stumble across a compelling new phenomenon called punk. Worth the price of admission for the image of Joey Ramone, so puny "the microphone stand seemed to be throwing him around" and the eye-witness account of Patti Smith howling "I'm so goddamned young!" on her UK debut. "An hour ago Evan would have smirked at this, especially as her T-shirt's flapping sleeves revealed her armpit's wattled skin. But now he accepted that being young had nothing to do with age."
In Manhattan at the turn of 21st century, three friends share the anxiety of having entered their thirties without having yet made their mark. Of the three, only Marina grew up in the city, her father having definitively made his own mark there as a crusading journalist - a hard act to follow. Danielle and Julius have come from Nowheresville to remake themselves as flamboyant successes, but Julius's secret life as a temp, and his squalid apartment, show the reality of survival. Then Marina's cousin Bootie arrives, raw, unshaped, with the reckless zeal of a Dostoevsky hero. The Jamesian ambitions of this long, close-focus novel, with its jolting, many-claused sentences, do not prevent it from being a thoroughly absorbing read, as soapy and entertaining as something with fewer pretensions to grandeur. The steps of good fortune and calamity rise and fall like a ziggurat, until all the characters are floored by horror on a greater scale than any of them ever imagined. Humorous, worldly, alive to both the kitsch and the glamour of New York City, this beautifully structured novel skewers moral vacuity and hypocrisy with a sureness of touch that is deeply satisfying.
Canvey Island in Essex was reclaimed from the sea in the 17th century, but in January 1953 the sea tried to take it back again. Dozens of people died in the terrible floods, including, in this fictionalised account, Lily Turner, mother of a small boy who almost drowns too but survives because he loses his grip on his mother's hand. Martin's life is shaped by the tragedy. He grows up obsessed with the idea of holding back the sea, measuring it, testing it, fighting it. And in his emotional life, he is always afraid that fate may surge in and drag away anyone he is foolish enough to love as much as his mother. Seven characters pass the narrative between them to tell their family's story. They trace a linear progression through the last half of the 20th century, knitting their own lives into the fabric of history: Churchill's funeral, Aldermaston, cup finals, Greenham Common, and on through Thatcherism to the near present. All the touchstones of nostalgia are dropped in: fruit salads, Lambretta scooters, Evening in Paris perfume, Black Forest gateau and Blue Nun wine. This material was perhaps more memorably handled by Jonathan Coe in The Rotters' Club, but Runcie advances through the decades with great skill.
Journalist Simon Beckett turned his hand to crime fiction after a visit to the Body Farm in Tennessee, a groundbreaking facility where donated bodies are left to decay in various terrains, so that forensic anthropologists can study insect activity to ascertain time of death. He demonstrates all he learned there in the opening chapter, where two schoolboys wandering through the Norfolk Broads discover the body of a woman via the "umbilical of death" left by a trail of maggots. The effect this has on the boys, and the rest of their community in the isolated village of Manham, are seen through the eyes of "incomer" David Hunter, who has recently taken up work here as a doctor to flee his haunted past. Naturally, the past just won't stay buried. Hunter is a forensic anthropologist and, when the local police realise this, he is dragged back into helping them. It is at this point that all promise of originality slowly dissolves into a plot heaving with horror and crime clichés - a psychopath at large, Hunter assailed by surly yokels and a righteous reverend, a pub called the Black Lamb and a dénouement that requires the immediate services of Hammer studios. One for the gorehounds.