Paradise Block

In these brilliant stories Alice Ash taps into a deep and compelling strangeness with vigour and humour and heart. This is a disturbing and moving collection, an unusual combination I'd like to encounter more often. "I cannot look away", one of her narrators remarks; that's how I felt, too. -- Chris Power, author * Mothers *
Alice Ash's writing gets right at the rot underneath the polish of things, picking out the gothic in the full light of day. ... These are dangerous stories of the best kind: treading the line between terror and delight. I couldn't peel my eyes off them. -- Livia Franchini, author * Shelf Life *
Searingly brilliant ... She is a witch with words. -- Emma Jane Unsworth
This debut collection brims with honesty, humanity and a strong sense of the absurd ... inventive and energetic * TLS *
A chorus of voices, an inventory of lives lived, relics formed from both joy and hardship... Mesmerising * White Review *
A powerful testimony to the reality of life on the margins. Raw, bizarre, disturbing, funny and uncanny. -- Cathy Sweeney, author * Modern Times *
The best weird fiction holds up a fairground mirror to what we blithely call normal, reflecting a reality that warps and flickers. In Paradise Block, Alice Ash creates a world that is disturbingly Not. Restless and unsettling, these stories take a step sideways and away from the expected. Uneasy and deliciously wrong. -- Rosie Garland, author * The Palace of Curiosities *
Engaging, funny and surprising in equal measure, these stories are the work of a wonderfully unconventional imagination -- Laura Kaye, author * English Animals *
A collection to savour - strange, funny, touching; Paradise Block is bound to be one of the debuts of the year ... it's very good -- Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts
This is not a green and pleasant land, but something much more prevalent, over-looked and deeply English. These stories depict difficult, often cash-poor characters, but they are respectfully written with such texture and poetry that they give voice to the thousands of lives that they echo. Eclectic, dark, moving and sometimes very funny. -- Kate Sawyer, author of The Stranding
Lively, unerring, intimate and gorgeously grotesque! Sentences as satisfying as feeling the cool squish of silt between your toes. As you merrily connect the dots between crisscrossing lives, these stories will get under your skin & make themselves at home there. -- Gemma Reeves, author of Victoria Park
A matrix-like collection that reinvents the short story genre... the uneasy meshing of lives and stories is a reminder there is a strange poetry to co-existence. * Arts Desk *
An unconventional collection that treads the line between the disturbing and the delightful... These stories get under your skin. * The F Word *
Though dark, these stories are moving and funny, their stance on class and responsibility offering instances of bright clarity that turn the magnifying glass back onto the reader with a raised eyebrow ... read Paradise Block for a carnivalesque reflection of the world we live in. * Mslexia *
Alice Ash shows such a knack for melding the mad with the mundane that it is hard to believe that this is her debut collection ... When some of the more prominent players in the individual stories turn up in another narrative, Ash does a superb job of making those connections real and helping us to see her characters from a whole host of angles... urgent and involving * Bookmunch *
Dark, compelling imagination ... This is a writer to look out for * Edge Hill Prize Judges' Citation *