Robert Graham

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Biographical note:  Robert Graham grew up around Belfast and lives with his wife and three children in Manchester. He teaches Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Cheshire Faculty. He is the co-author, with Keith Baty, of Elvis – The Novel (The Do-Not Press, 1997). His short stories have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies and on Radio 4. He is the author of How To Write Fiction (And Think About It) (Palgrave, 2006) and co-author of The Road To Somewhere: A Creative Writing Companion (Palgrave, 2005) and Everything You Need To Know About Creative Writing (Continuum, 2007). He has written and directed over a dozen youth theatre productions. His first novel, Holy Joe, was published by Troubador in 2006.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715749
ISBN:  9781844715749
Author:  Robert Graham
Title:  The Only Living Boy
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FNB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jul-09
Extent:  128pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  ‘When I think of the trouble they’ve got me in, I don’t know why I love Parker pens the way I do…’

Robert Graham’s elegantly crafted short stories are heartwarming, quirky and shot through with moments of surprise and delight.

The title story’s teenaged protagonist finds his view of life transformed when he meets an attractive girl who announces herself as an absolutist. The narrator of ‘Celebrity Blessings’ finds the affirmation he lacks from the living and dead celebs he meets in his local supermarket. ‘Fruit or Vegetable’ features Joe and Sarah, the central characters from Robert Graham’s acclaimed novel Holy Joe.

Table of contents:
The Only Living Boy
Fruit or Vegetable?
Celebrity Blessings
Did The Strand
Bathers
The Urban Spacemen
The Life Class
Playing Gershwin
Mud
The Walking Plan
And In The Wisps Of Passing Clouds
The Secret Life of Frank
Acknowledgements

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Excerpt from book:  

The Only Living Boy

Will and I and his sister Elaine, who was seventeen, were in the back seats of the camper-van and when it crested the hill. Uncle Geoff’s MGB GT was parked on the grass outside the cottage.

The front door admitted straight onto the living room, which had a three-piece suite covered in faded flowery chintz, a dining table with an oilcloth over it and an open fire with a kettle on an iron stand that you could swing over the flames.

‘Just the same,’ Will said and when I turned I saw he was carrying a record player and some records.

‘Where’d they come from?’ I asked.

‘Elaine’s.’

‘Let’s see.’


He gave me the LPs. There were four of them. Bridge Over Troubled Water, which everyone in the world owned a copy of; Songs From A Room; Bread’s On The Waters, and America by, well, America.

I had wondered sometimes why Will got to bring a friend on holiday and Elaine didn’t. If I had asked him about it he would have said it was because she had no friends, but I never asked. It turned out Elaine did have a friend and she was arriving on Monday. She was called Libby.

We were in the middle of a game of Monopoly, the three of us. The Simon & Garfunkel LP was playing. Elaine was cautious and hung on to her cash to cover any large rent demands she ran into, which was what had just happened: #600 for two houses on Will’s Mayfair.

‘Tee-hee-hee,’ Will went.

‘Don’t gloat,’ Elaine snapped, shuffling banknotes. ‘Not a problem, as it happens.’

Paul Simon was declaring that there were times when he was so lonesome he took some comfort with the whores on 7th Avenue.

‘What a pseud,’ Will scoffed. ‘He couldn’t just go to the whores because he was feeling horny.’

‘In fact,’ I said, ‘ “Feeling Horny” was the original title of “Feeling Groovy”. But they had to clean it up for radio.’

Later, ‘The Only Living Boy In New York’ played and the chorus — So here I am, the only living boy in New York — came in like a force 9 gale and knocked me sideways.

‘What age is your friend?’ I asked Elaine.

‘Libby?’ she said, like this was an unusual thing to ask. ‘Seventeen.’


At breakfast that first Sunday, Uncle Geoff asked us if we wanted to take a turn at the wheel of the MG. Elaine was included in the invitation, but she didn’t seem interested. Perhaps she thought driving cars was boys’ stuff.

Outside, the sunlight was clear and airy and the sky as wide as any continent.

‘You drive, Mark,’ Uncle Geoff said. ‘Visitors first, eh?’ He opened the driver’s door and ducked in to slide the key in the ignition. Rather than squeeze into the rear bench seat, Will opted to hang around on the beach until it was his turn. I glanced at him, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye. While he trudged over the marram grass to the sands below, I lowered myself into the driver’s seat. I was tall, and could have done with a shoehorn.

Once I was installed, it felt more like being in a cockpit than a car. I studied the array of chrome-ringed dials on the black instrument panel, patted the steering wheel and swung the gear lever from side to side. I looked across when Uncle Geoff appeared in the passenger seat and he beamed back at me.

‘Engage the clutch,’ he said. ‘And move through the gears. That’s right.’ He asked me to put the gear lever back into neutral and then told me to switch on the engine. It turned over with a cough and settled into a warm, throaty sound.

I looked at Uncle Geoff, who nodded. I engaged first, gingerly released the clutch and set off, the engine revving as I progressed through the gears until it reached a sweet roar at thirty miles an hour. Through the windscreen, the pale strand swept towards me.

‘Like it?’ Uncle Geoff asked.

‘I love it,’ I said and gently put my foot down.

Unpublished endorsement:  Robert Graham writes about desire and disappointment and coming to terms – and ultimately about hope. His eye for the epiphanic moment is sharp and unblinking, his witty, well-turned prose always a source of pleasure

Nicholas Royle