Showing Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty by Harland Miller

It's 1980, "Captain Beaky" is at number one and Billy "the Kid" Glover can't decide what to do with his life. In his Yorkshire hometown, the options stretch to the chocolate factory and impersonating a Victorian for the delight of tourists. After an unsuccessful stint as a cat-burglar, the Kid is forced to leave the parental home and survive on his wits. He falls under the spell of Ziggy Hero, David Bowie impersonator and local landmark, and joins him in his plan to arrange the mother of all gigs. Things never proceed as planned but their mission becomes an Odyssean journey through the underbelly of local life, a world populated by transvestite drug-dealers, murderous gypsies and those who yearn to escape.

To describe Miller's comic tour de force as a "rites of passage" would be a gross injustice. The traditional elements are there--grim pubs, bad trips and doped flatmates--but this author juggles them with a skill and insight rare in first novels. The indignities and glories of North-country life in the 1980s are evoked with unsettling intensity, and steeped in a humour that is 100 per cent original. In future decades, this book will be cherished like an old album. --Matthew Baylis