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Neil Campbell

The third part of Neil Campbell's Manchester Trilogy, in which our struggling young writer finds love with a girl called Cho. Where a love song to Manchester becomes a love song to Cho.
Lanyards explores how the jobs we wear around our necks dictate the ways we are identified.
Building on the previous novel in the trilogy, Zero Hours, our protagonist finds himself on universal credit, taking agency jobs, moving from learning support work in schools and colleges to call centre jobs and back again, via a failed attempt at getting a job as a driver on the Metrolink tram network.
Lanyards portrays the comic and poignant moments of working life. All the time reflecting back on the football career the narrator might have had were he not injured, his life as a writer, his experiences of being in a mixed race couple with the Hong Kong born Cho, the Manchester Arena bombing, the continuing success of his beloved Manchester City, the child sex abuse scandals in football, the disparities of wealth in contemporary Britain, and the death of a childhood friend that continues to haunt him.

Salt

Manchester Trilogy

Lanyards

In this, the second volume of a projected Manchester trilogy, the young writer takes a zero-hours job in a mail-sorting depot but struggles to cope with the demands of menial work and the attitudes of his colleagues. Only after rescuing and acquiring a pet tortoise does he realise what is most lacking in his life: intimacy. Embarking on a handful of sexual misadventures, he continues to struggle as a writer. He sees the city in which he was born and brought up changing all around him and, when he gets sacked from the sorting office, some hard choices lie ahead.
A powerful indictment of austerity politics and Brexit Britain, the novel never loses sight of its working-class characters' dignity and humanity, and Campbell's mordantly witty dialogue ensures that the next laugh is never far away. Gripping in its fascination with the everyday, Zero Hours is keenly observed, blackly funny and ultimately uplifting.

Zero Hours

A young warehouseman, his promising football career cut short by injury, counts flanges, valves and couplings for a living. He longs for the warmth and women of the office, but the prostitutes who hang around the high-rise are easier to deal with. Drink provides relief, if not escape, and probably the last thing he should dream of becoming is a writer, but then he buys himself a note pad and pen.
This debut novel by Neil Campbell, author of the short story collections Broken Doll and Pictures From Hopper, is a moving and darkly comic meditation on the challenge of trying to realise dreams in a harsh and unfair world.