Kerry Hadley-Pryce, "God's Country"

Kerry Hadley-Pryce was born in the Black Country. She worked nights in a Wolverhampton petrol station before becoming a secondary school teacher. A leading exponent of ‘Black Country noir,’ her previous Salt novels were substantial critical successes and helped popularise Gothic writing from the Black Country. She wrote her first novel, The Black Country, whilst studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School, for which she gained a distinction and for which she was awarded the Michael Schmidt Prize for outstanding achievement. Her second novel Gamble was shortlisted for the Encore Second Novel Award. She has had several short stories published both in print and online. She has just completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. God’s Country is her third novel. She lives in Stourbridge and tweets @kerry2001

About God's Country, by Kerry Hadley-Pryce

In God’s Country, Guy Flood returns to the Black Country with his girlfriend, Alison, to attend his identical twin brother’s funeral. The reasons he left, and the secrets he left behind, slowly become clear. A chilling dark fiction, dominated by unknown and all-seeing narrator.

You can read more about God's Country on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From God's Country

Guy looked at her, and she’ll say she knew that look well. She’ll tell how she rubbed her fingertips lightly and briefly on the outside of his thigh. 

‘Oh, Christ, Guy…’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’ 

Guy sighed. He would have sighed instead of saying anything.

‘That was thoughtless, me saying something like that,’ she said. ‘I’m really sorry.’

Ahead of them, she’ll say the traffic had just begun to move. They would have been able to see it begin to shift, like the vertebrae of an enormous monster that they were part of, and up ahead, the blue lights of the fire engines, the police cars. 

‘I really am,’ Alison said, and she would have been squeezing his thigh, and her breath would have been chemical with thirst. ‘I’m an idiot for saying that.’ 

She’ll say now, she just needed to keep him on-side. 

Don’t feel sorry for her.

She’ll tell how she remembers Guy finding first gear, saying, ‘Thank Christ for that,’ and how he was concentrating on the horizon, leaning forward, seeming to want to push forward physically. She would have taken hold of his fingers if she could have, if she could have brought herself to, that is, but both his hands were on the wheel, and it was late, and nobody wants to be late for their own brother’s funeral, especially when it’s your twin brother ...

Middleway Words: The Programme

We recently announced news of a new book festival based in the Midlands, Middleway Words, which will take place from the 5th to 11th September 2021. You can see the original announcement and information here. This is an online festival of books and literature across the Midlands, aimed at promoting authors and books in the region. There will be events, talks, workshops, readings and interviews, and all of it is free. 

You can now register for free tickets for the festival on Eventbrite here. 

You can download the programme for the festival on the Eventbrite site, or directly here. 

On Friday 10th September at 4pm, the festival includes a conversation between novelist Kerry Hadley-Pryce and Jonathan Taylor of the University of Leicester. All are welcome, and the event, like all others in the festival, is free. 

Kerry Hadley-Pryce, "Gamble"

 

Kerry Hadley-Pryce was born in the Black Country. She worked nights in a Wolverhampton petrol station before becoming a secondary school teacher. She wrote her first novel, The Black Country, whilst studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, for which she gained a distinction and was awarded the Michael Schmidt Prize for Outstanding Achievement 2013–14. Gamble, her second novel, was shortlisted for the Encore Second Novel Award, 2019. Both novels were published by Salt Publishing. She is currently a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, researching Psychogeography and Black Country Writing, and is working on her third novel, God's Country.

Kerry's website is here. You can read an earlier interview with Kerry Hadley-Pryce on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

About Gamble

Greg Gamble: he’s a teacher, he works hard, he’s a husband, a father. He’s a good man, or tries to be. But even a good man can face a crisis. Even a good man can face temptation. Even a good man can find himself faced with difficult choices.

Greg Gamble: he thinks he can keep his head in the game. He thinks he’s trying to be good. Until he realises everyone is flawed.

And for Gamble, trying to be good just isn’t enough.

From Gamble

To him, she’d taste of vanilla, or cucumber, or raw chives, perhaps. She looked like that kind of girl, he thought. 

He’ll say he’d watched her arrive, and how the van was parked across his driveway. It would have bothered him before, anyone parking across the driveway; that day though, he’d stood at his living room window (the ‘lounge’, his wife, Carolyn, called it. He hates that word: lounge) and he’d watched her, this girl, through the gap in the mesh of net curtain, and he’d wondered what she’d taste like. He felt a little bit sick – sometimes standing for too long did that to him – but he was trying to ignore all that, and anyway, it was Monday, and he’ll say he always felt the cloy of nerves at the start of another week of teaching. So, watching the girl was taking his mind off all that. Words like ‘willowy’, ‘asymmetrical’ and ‘seemly’ mixed with ‘uncareful’, ‘wild’ and ‘brash’ in his mind as he watched her. Her hair, he noticed, was almost blonde – some bits of it were rapeseedy, he decided – and she seemed to have a habit of pushing stray strands behind her ear. She did that a lot, he noticed. He counted. Fourteen times. There seemed a regularity to her way of doing it, and it reminded him of poetry, the way she kept repeating it. She was carrying cardboard boxes into the building opposite and, as he stood watching her, he came to realise he’d never really noticed it, that building. It was a building, and it was just there opposite his 1950s semi. Looking back now, he questions all that. But he was noticing the girl, just then. She wore, he thought, very red lipstick, and that made her look odd, or the lips look odd, like she had a permanent pout, or had been punched, and he found he was forming an opinion about that. He watched her enter the building and then reappear, and became aware that, with every appearance of her, he’d suck in his stomach, straighten his back. Becoming aware of it made him feel somehow ineligible and a little despairing. He’ll say he realised then, he needed someone to talk to. Just to talk.

Reading in Loughborough Library

All welcome! At Loughborough Library, 7pm Tuesday 25 April: Four Authors, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, Maria Taylor and myself, will be reading from and talking about their novels and poetry. Booking details are on the poster, and there's a Facebook event here.