CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Angela Readman - Fiddling the Gas
Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Fiddling the Gas
Angela Readman
My father never gave me the stars, but he came
to my first flat to knock the moon on its back.
I let him in, snow on his hair fusing to grey as he bent
on one knee and I offered him coffee – a stranger,
a daughter, unsure what to say. It seems we waited
for the plumber all our lives, my mother and I inched
through sleeping bag Decembers, peered into hatches
at dead boilers, the light blown out of their eyes.
He drilled the cast and smeared black wax on the hole
to disguise our partnership in crime. It was like skating
on Saturn, the way we gazed at the dial. Just once,
the world span on a flipped coin in our pockets, simple
as stopped clocks in our hands. Together, we knelt to see
steel turn out winter, the meter rolling back time.
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