This is a quite the breath of air that I've been waiting for, after last reading Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting"; Barrett seems to have his finger on the pulse of everyday adventure with bored teenagers and youths, and their outlook on life, which permeates this book, a collection of short stories from the northern part of Great Britain.

My town is nowhere you have been, but you know its ilk. A roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen Cineplex, a century of pubs packed inside the square mile of the town’s limits. The Atlantic is near; the gnarled jawbone of the coastline with its gull-infested promontories is near. Summer evenings, and in the manure-scented pastures of the satellite parishes the Zen bovines lift their heads to contemplate the V8 howls of the boy racers tearing through the back lanes. I am young, and the young do not number many here, but it is fair to say we have the run of the place.

Boredom, violence, inner despair, bullshit and impressing girls, well, it's all here along with some stellar descriptions on how people perceive each other.

It's all everyday, of persons trying to make something out of life, almost as anti-heroes without realising they are just that.

Bat’s head hurts. He drank six beers on the roof of his house last night, which he does almost every night, now. The pain is a rooted throb, radiating outwards, like a skull-sized toothache, and his eyes mildly burn; working his contact lenses in this morning, he’d subjected his corneas to a prolonged and shaky-handed thumb-fucking. A distant, dental instrument drone fills his ears like fluid. Hangovers exacerbate Bat’s tinnitus.

Good reads.