CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
Skint Estate
by Cash Carraway
(Penguin Random House, £14.99)
OPEN Skint Estate on almost any page and you are likely to encounter shit, semen or blood.
From page one, where we find the narrator hiding in a train toilet to avoid buying a ticket and discovering that her jeans are smeared in “someone else’s shit” from the toilet pan, to the smell of stale semen at the peep show where she works, to a blood-drenched account of how she “lost her vagina” during a botched childbirth, this is a book soaked in bodily fluids.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
While politicians fixate on defence budgets, the real answers lie in peace-building and economic justice, says ALAN SIMPSON
The book feels like a writer working within his limits and not breaking any new ground, believes KEN COCKBURN
Timeloop murder, trad family MomBomb, Sicilian crime pages and Craven praise
MARY CONWAY is blown away by a flawless production of Lynn Nottage’s exquisite tragedy


