Neil Campbell

A young warehouseman, his promising football career cut short by injury, counts flanges, valves and couplings for a living. He longs for the warmth and women of the office, but the prostitutes who hang around the high-rise are easier to deal with. Drink provides relief, if not escape, and probably the last thing he should dream of becoming is a writer, but then he buys himself a note pad and pen.This debut novel by Neil Campbell, author of the short story collections Broken Doll and Pictures From Hopper, is a moving and darkly comic meditation on the challenge of trying to realise dreams in a harsh and unfair world.

Nobody believes what they see on TV, so they want to look for something else, an alternate reality, or a conspiracy theory, and its interesting to explore it, Twitter is fucking full of it, especially now. Its no wonder people round here are into it, but you dont have to read all that shit, just have some mushrooms and wander round Lidl off your tits.In these fourteen northern tales, Campbell takes us from the edgelands of Manchester to the cloistered villages of The Peak District, Northumberland and Scotland, and illuminates the lives of outsiders, misfits, loners and malcontents with an eye for the darkly comic. A wild-eyed man disturbs the banter in a genial bookshop. A fraught woman seeks to flee a collapsing reservoir. A failed academic finds solace in a crime writers favourite pub. A transit van killer stalks a railway footpath. A poet accused of plagiarism finds his life falling apart.

Charles Darwin describió la evolución como un proceso de ''descendencia con modificación'', concepto que se adapta muy bien a la continua evolución de esta obra. La séptima edición de Biología constituye la revision mas ambiciosa desde su origen y representa una nueva especie de libro de texto con varias adaptaciones evolutivas generadas por los cambios en los cursos de biologia y por el progreso sorprendente de la investigacion en esta ciencia. Mantiene sus valores pedagogicos centrales basados, por un lado, en diagramar capitulo a partir de un marco de conceptos clave que relacionan los detalles con el tema global y, por el otro, en lograr la participacion de los estudiantes combinando diversos ejemplos de investigacion en biologia con la oportunidad de que planteen y resuelvan los interrogantes por si mismos. Entre otros aspectos destacables se encuentran: - Al comienzo de cada capitulo, los Conceptos clave puntualizan los aspectos fundamentales del texto que se describen en forma amplia en el apartado Panorama general. Despues de la explicacion del tema, preguntas de evaluacion permiten comprobar la comprension de cada concepto antes de continuar con el siguiente. - Las respuestas de evaluacion, asi como las de las Preguntas de autoevaluacion de cada capitulo se encuentran al final del l...

In this, the second volume of a projected Manchester trilogy, the young writer takes a zero-hours job in a mail-sorting depot but struggles to cope with the demands of menial work and the attitudes of his colleagues. Only after rescuing and acquiring a pet tortoise does he realise what is most lacking in his life: intimacy. Embarking on a handful of sexual misadventures, he continues to struggle as a writer. He sees the city in which he was born and brought up changing all around him and, when he gets sacked from the sorting office, some hard choices lie ahead.A powerful indictment of austerity politics and Brexit Britain, the novel never loses sight of its working-class characters dignity and humanity, and Campbells mordantly witty dialogue ensures that the next laugh is never far away. Gripping in its fascination with the everyday, Zero Hours is keenly observed, blackly funny and ultimately uplifting.

The third part of Neil Campbells Manchester Trilogy, in which our struggling young writer finds love with a girl called Cho. Where a love song to Manchester becomes a love song to Cho.Lanyards explores how the jobs we wear around our necks dictate the ways we are identified.Building on the previous novel in the trilogy, Zero Hours, our protagonist finds himself on universal credit, taking agency jobs, moving from learning support work in schools and colleges to call centre jobs and back again, via a failed attempt at getting a job as a driver on the Metrolink tram network. Lanyards portrays the comic and poignant moments of working life. All the time reflecting back on the football career the narrator might have had were he not injured, his life as a writer, his experiences of being in a mixed race couple with the Hong Kong born Cho, the Manchester Arena bombing, the continuing success of his beloved Manchester City, the child sex abuse scandals in football, the disparities of wealth in contemporary Britain, and the death of a childhood friend that continues to haunt him.

Campbell gives voice to the extraordinary (never ordinary) men and women of Manchester. He goes beyond the Kings English and formulaic approaches to short stories to capture, in print, how people really talk. Think James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, but Mancunian. Funny and heartfelt, this book is a romp to whizz through with pleasure. Forget mad for it Madchester, this is the Manchester of now, where Hacienda cliches turn into corporate nightmares and the only art is in marketing.