A remarkable debut novel about the pornography of everyday life - as hilarious as it is twisted.
Justin wants a sex life, not a sex death. Rebecca wants to walk the unlit corridors of men’s brains. They both want joy. Steve wants cash so he can enjoy his trendy body. He wants Carly, too, but she just wants a never-ending orgasm. Johnny wants to be touched and, if possible, he’d like to seem happy. Colin wants to know why tits make his fists clench. This is their story. They try their best. They drag their feet through the fashions, the foul, the famous and the drunk of twenty-first century Britain. They’re looking for happiness. What they find is friction.
In this filthy, ferocious and very very funny debut, Joe Stretch launches a full-frontal attack on the pornography of everyday life, imagining a world where shopping reigns supreme, sex has ceased to have anything to do with love, and pregnancy has become the final fetish.
Author Biography
Joe Stretch was born in 1982 and brought up in Lancashire. He moved to Manchester at the age of 18 to study politics at Manchester University. His band, Performance, in which he is lead singer and lyricist, released their debut album in 2007.
Friction is his first novel.
Reviews
Transports the dystopian sexuality of Michel Houellebecq to the throbbing bars of Manchester, where a gaggle of characters numb their morality in pursuit of the ultimate orgasm. Satirically imagining a bleakly banal world of rampant consumerism and pregnancy as the final, putrid fetish,
Friction snarls, spits and crackles like an anti Sex and the City or Kafka with cum-shots,Joe Stretch is such an original writer it's pointless to compare him to anyone, yet his black humour, sardonic tone and sheer readability suggest that
Anthony Burgess is alive and well and still living in Manchester. This is A Clockwork Orange for the 21st century,Raw, wild, aflame with ideas,
Friction will bring a cure-or-kill medicinal shock to our post-boom hangover,A sharp and intense world created by a radical new writer,Vicious, funny and disturbingly honest,
Friction is a fine debut from an assured new writer,Clever, savvy, licentious and macabrely funny with it,Like Houellebecq for generation WHY,A caustic comedy, and doesn’t mark the arrival of a new provocateur but of a promising satirist,Joe Stretch takes no prisoners with this debut, presenting
a distorted reflection of 21st century Britain that’s as black as it is bracing…
Friction succeeds as a highly charged vision of modern society’s moral decline – it’s a novel that may well achieve the cult status it’s striving for,
Friction is a bellow of rage and disgust at the eagerness with which the 21st century soul attenuates itself. That this trivia-obsessed, pornography-fraught and digitised-to-death world that we have made for ourselves can produce
such high art, and with such slicing satirical humour, is one of the central paradoxes, and causes for celebration, of our age
