Black Car Burning

A love letter to [Mort’s] home city of Sheffield… Politics and landscape are fiercely intertwined in the history of South Yorkshire, and Mort now demonstrates that she can write as assuredly on both subjects in novel form as in her poetry… Mort, in a beautifully accomplished debut, has blended a rich alloy: a deeply felt work of loss, time and healing – Catherine Taylor * The Guardian *Mort has reined in the poetry to write a gritty northern novel in a lean, unflashy prose, only letting herself go in lyrical interludes spoken by the landscape itself – Phil Baker * Sunday Times *A book that deals empathetically and movingly with [Sheffield’s] ongoing legacy – Yvette Huddleston * Yorkshire Post *Black Car Burning does what surprisingly few books even attempt: it gives a voice to the lyric landscapes of South Yorkshire, it looks beyond binary clichés to consider the real lives of real people in streets and suburbs that are often forgotten; Mort handles trauma, lust and loss so tenderly and deftly, it is hard to believe that this is a first novel – Andrew McMillan, author of PhysicalThis book is a symphony of voices: of lovers and the land they grasp in strong but scar-lined hands. Black Car Burning channels the soul of a city and its surrounds. Helen Mort shifts with deftness and empathy from the sensuous to the dark, communing with slandered neighbourhoods, the shadow of a disaster, and a generation’s complex ascents through love. A hymn to a special city and an unforgettable book – Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping PlacesA deeply internalised tale about love and yearning, trauma and loss, and springs from a place where the whispered thoughts of both people and places intersect in unsettling fashion – Helen Nugent * Northern Soul, Books of the Year *

Helen Mort has published three collections of poetry- Division Street (2013), winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, No Map Could Show Them (2016) and The Illustrated Woman (2022). Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Forward, T. S. Eliot and Costa Prizes. She has written a novel, Black Car Burning (2019) and a short story collection, Exire (2019). Her creative non-fiction includes A Line Above The Sky (2022), winner of the Boardman Tasker Award, and Ethel (2024). She is a Professor in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield.

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