Ten Storey Love Song, signed reissue, published by White Rabbit, 2023.

‘“Hello,” says the wallpaper.’

Spanning one torrential paragraph, Ten Storey Love Song follows Bobby the Artist's rise to stardom and decline into horrific drug psychosis, Johnnie's attempts to stop thieving and start pleasing Ellen in bed, and Alan Blunt, a forty-year-old container driver who spends a worrying amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school. Bobby - the so-called 'love-child of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat', holed up in a Middlesbrough tower block - works on his canvases under the influence of pills-on-toast, dirt-cheap cider and dream pop.

When Bent Lewis, an art dealer from London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a breakneck adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence, their frayed lives and assorted addictions - sex, money, fame, pick-’n’-mix and, above all, love - bleeding together in one glorious, ferocious slab of technicolour concrete prose.

'Milward is a major talent, and his love for his characters shines through any degrading obstacles he forces them to encounter. When writers are being churned out of creative fiction courses like salmon from fish farms, he possesses that scarcest quality: a highly original and engaging voice' - Irvine Welsh, The Guardian

'Milward has that rare gift of being able to capture and distill an entire generation in a single, simple sentence. Brilliant. Very very funny and utterly original' - Helen Walsh, author of Brass and Once Upon a Time in England