The Dead Don't Bleed

This dangerous delight is what happens when one of Britain’s best poets marries Lorca’s landscapes and 1970s gangland Newcastle in fiction — a thrilling, deep-song, high-proof novel that’s brilliantly imagined, gorgeously crafted and several cuts above the usual debut – Sarah Hall
Throw Sexy Beast and Get Carter in a blender, add some Lorcanian duende from blasted blood-drenched Spain and some of that soul-sadness from the sodden, post-industrial far north of England, and you’ll get something like this gripping, compelling, elegiac and dismayed novel. Savage, sorrowful, superb – Niall Griffiths
Marrying the violence, duende and scouring light of Lorca’s Andalusia to the broken bottles and police sirens of 1970s Newcastle, this compelling, beautifully written story of male heartbreak slyly explores the way poetry helps you survive your past – Ruth Padel
The Dead Don’t Bleed is vivid, lyrical and propulsive. Each scene feels charged: a current of violence crackles throughout. Every sentence, every word, is in its rightful place – Malachy Tallack
Bristling with brutality, it is written with masterly control…a descriptive tour de force… Crossing over into fiction, Rollinson has lost none of his poetry’s flair or concerns, and has given them even greater impact * Literary Review *
[A] beautifully written, dark debut novel * Independent *
An extraordinarily tense and tender portrait of two brothers trying to escape their father’s gangland past… One of this novel’s many successes is in capturing the terror of illicit attraction… [it is] heartbreaking * Guardian *
[A] tight, artful first novel… The Dead Don’t Bleed is terse, bloody and vivid * The Times *
Rollinson’s gritty, soot-stained lyricism, together with the sombre, oppressive atmosphere, leaves a strong impression * Daily Mail *
The Dead Don’t Bleed hits a lot of the right notes… a pleasingly thoughtful and atmospheric crime caper * Daily Telegraph *

Neil Rollinson is the author of four poetry collections- A Spillage of Mercury (1996), Spanish Fly (2001), Demolition (2007) and Talking Dead (2015). He won the National Poetry Competition in 1997, received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2005, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize for Talking Dead. The Dead Don’t Bleed is his debut novel, and won the Deborah Rogers Award for previously unpublished prose writers in 2023.

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