O My Days by David Mathew

O My Days by David Mathew

BILY ALFRETH IS SERVING FIVE YEARS as an inmate at Dellacotte Young Offenders Institute, in the north of England. Billy has memories of being attacked by three men, but CTV footage doesn't bear out his account and he is locked up for stabbing one man. Billy's world overlaps with that of Ronald Dott, a serial rapist, who claims to know Billy from when he was a child, only that is impossible. And then there is Kate Thistle, ostensibly at Dellacotte to study prison slang, but inordinately interested in both Dott and Billy. As strange events occur and his reality begins to unravel, Billy learns of the Oasis, and a prison ship, and of a desert town called Hospital, where time works in mysterious ways. Dott tells Billy of their terrible entwined histories. whether or not Billy wants to be convinced of what he cannot understand.

I experienced an acute, often surreal, sense of an offender's pathology, with all its traps, humour and contradictions. O My Days is a tour de force of powerful writing. It's demanding, gruelling yet always honest, insightful and finally moving. It explores areas that serious fiction rarely travels to. A quite remarkable novel.

Alan Price, author of Outfoxing Hyenas

This is a writer who has been there, viewed with compassion, and reported back. There is a new mythos here, something that feels ancient and sand-blasted and unfathomable, but it is revealed within the most modern of contexts. Highly recommended.

Paul Meloy, author of Islington Crocodiles

David Mathew is the author of the novels O My Days, Ventriloquists, The Parry and the Lunge and Dreadnought Flex, among other works. His shorter fiction is collected in Sick Dice and Panic Soup. A full-time academic in the Centre for Learning Excellence at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, he has a PhD in Higher Education and Psychoanalysis, and his academic work is published in the books Fragile Learning: The Influence of Anxiety, The Care Factory, and the forthcoming Psychic River: Storms and Safe Ports in Lifelong Learning and Long Lessons: The Endurance of Anxiety (a follow-up volume to Fragile Learning). He is a keen student of psychoanalysis and human behaviour, as well as of group activity. He lives in the south-east of England and enjoys hiking with his dog and the musical genres of jazz fusion and post-rock (although not at the same time).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781940233222
ISBN 10	1940233224
Title	O My Days
Author	David Mathew
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Montag Press
Year published	2015-06-29
Number of pages	308
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.