I know I've read The Offing by Benjamim Myers and enjoyed it, but I can't remember how or why I picked this one up. I think it must have just caught my eye in the library. I go to craft club every Monday morning in my local library but they are refurbishing it at the moment so they're in the local town hall at the moment. They still have a room we can use which is brilliant. They only have a few books in the much smaller room - but of course, they can order anything in that you might want - so maybe that's helped me to see the wood for the trees or something, because I have picked up a few books that have popped out at me.
I read this at the beginning of October so the details are a bit hazy - we're in mid November as I'm writing this - so please do bear with me. I did really like the book, though. It's set in Scarborough and I love books that are set in the north of England as it's where I live myself. I know Scarborough quite well after going a thousand times throughout my life, so it was lovely to be able to picture the streets and the harbour and bays perfectly.
The book is about Northern Soul music. In Scarborough there's Dinah, who lives with her husband and son, who are both useless human beings. Her husband drinks too much and her son, while an adult, sits in his bedroom smoking weed and so on. She works a thankless job (I want to say in like a supermarket or something, can't remember exactly) and she loves Northern Soul. She can lose herself in the music a couple of times a week, and she does. She reaches out to a musician called Bucky Bronco, who had a couple of hits way back in the sixties, and then vanished off the face of the earth. Dinah has managed to find him, and she invites him to Scarborough to sing.
Bucky Bronco is now an old man, living by himself in Chicago after the death of his beloved wife, Maybelle. He had some kind of injury and now has an opioid addiction. He is basically just getting through life, talking to his late wife and wishing it was his turn to go. He doesn't really think of his musical life. He has a lot of regrets and through the book we learn why his musical career was cut so short. This part was actually fascinating, because yes things happened in his personal life, but there was also a lot of music industry stuff that was so interesting. He hasn't sung since the late sixties but he decides to go to Scarborough anyway.
Then he manages to leave his pain pills on the aeroplane, so he is in England going cold turkey for the first time in like a decade or something. He stays in the Grand Hotel, which is a real hotel in Scarborough which anyone would recognise. Ben has described it perfectly - I know people who have stayed recently and apparently it's very shabby and run down now and not a patch of its glamorous past. I loved that Bucky - who was himself a bit faded and a call back to a different time - stayed there.
In all I'm giving this four out of five, it was a really good book about music and nostalgia and stuff.
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