Rotten

As opening lines go, "We got a McDonald's the night my mam got lung cancer" hits hard. But Richard Milward's debut novel Apples doesn't really follow up on that initial promise.

For a start, the plot is slight - centred on a gang of teenage girls led by Eve, and a loner lad called Adam - and seems to rather fizzle out. It's less of a story, and more of an evocation of a time and place - that time and place being the north east of England in the late 90s/early 00s.

Apples was written in Milward's early 20s and heavily inspired by the lightbulb moment of reading Irvine Welsh - and it shows. There's a breathless relish in the descriptions of unsavoury individuals and situations, seedy goings-on, self-destructive behaviour and sexual violence.

Milward's characters are self-centred and sex obsessed, unsure of themselves but often masking it with bravado, on a permanent mission to stave off smalltown boredom by getting fucked in one way or another. With little prospect of a positive future, they give it no thought, preferring to live very much for the present.

There are a handful of shocking incidents along the way that caught me off-guard, but in truth I think what most discomforted me about reading Apples is the way that it tore down and trashed cherished rose-tinted memories of my own teenage years, a few miles up the road in Northumberland in the early 90s.

Milward conjures up precisely the sort of rowdy and chaotic house parties I used go to - from describing buckets of "tac" in the garden and puking up homemade cocktails everywhere, to namechecking the notorious brand of white cider that was my particular poison. But, to use a spectacularly confused metaphor, he casts it all in a darker light - less hedonism, and more nihilism - and, if I'm honest, the flashes of casual racism and misogyny also ring true.

I'm not normally squeamish about this kind of thing in fiction, but this felt very close to the bone. The raw realism is what gives the novel its punch and, ultimately, is its strongest asset - but it's also precisely what made the book a painful read, personally speaking.