Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay

Newish Book of the Week
Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay
by Jeff Young
Imagine a book about post-war Liverpool that takes 90 pages to even mention the Beatles (and then only to say his mum was sad when they broke up). Young loves—has always loved—his home city, but the gods of his north England are the intensely local memory films of Terence Davies and the inscrutable pugnacity of Mark E. Smith and the Fall. He started walking its streets and back alleys and stairwells in the late '50s with his mum and granddad, and he's walked them ever since, open at all times to the sounds and sights and smells around him, but especially to the memories, his own and others, of Victorian smoke, Blitz bomb sites, and urban-planning delusions, of dockworkers and punks, of stale pints of brown and mild. It's a personal memory book that makes you understand what it means to love a living city, and all its ghosts.