Wildlife

Viciously funny, brave, challenging and hugely topical, this novel from Joe Stretch takes us on an unforgettable journey to a frighteningly familiar world. Are you ready?

Facebook mindfuck for the bollocks generation. I loved every funny, filthy word of it

Wildlife is hilarious, frightening and bonkers, like forcing a sheet of blotter acid into your computer's floppy-disk slot... Stretch's second outing finds the author somewhere between a demented, devilish David Attenborough and William S. Burroughs, exposing the disgraceful, manic behaviour of the strangest of all living creatures: ourselves

It is heartening to discover that the contemporary novel can still do amazing things... A serious meditation on technology and individualism.  Ballardian in scope, and equally as exciting as his brutal debut

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. His first novel, Friction, was published in 2008.

Are you ready to come together? 
 
Are you tired of typing out your interests and hyping up the details of your everyday life? Imagine then a social network that touches and loves, sweats and farts. Imagine romance in real time. Imagine humans licking rather than double clicking each other. Imagine the Wild World. Are you ready to come together? 
 
Lonely, horny and young, Janek, Anka, Roger and Joe find themselves being dragged out of their isolated existences and towards the promise of a perfect future - in the Wild World. Sex lives and real lives and written lives merge and tangle like wires until reality begins to crumble and the sky falls in...

Friction

A remarkable debut novel about the pornography of everyday life - as hilarious as it is twisted.

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

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

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

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

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 was his first novel, followed by Wildlife and The Adult.

Life in Manchester is sexy and stinking. Hold your breath. Justin wants a sex life, not a sex death. Rebecca has breasts but doesn't understand them. She needs to talk to Dostoevsky about erections, hairy armpits and firing squads. Life is difficult. 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.

Joe Stretch

The Adult is a tremendous novel. It takes its place with some of the very best of its genre – the right of passage. Very few people can do it well. Stretch has done it superbly well. I’m not surprised it won the Somerset Maugham Award. I’m sure it will go on to be widely read and cited. I do hope so

A properly bollock-droppingly brilliant novel

I knew from the first page that this was going to be a very funny book, but I didn't realise it would have so much heart and be so beautiful

So enjoyable... The Adult is closer to a state-of-the-nation novel than any typical bildungsroman

A ribald, well-observed, coming-of-age comedy… Beautifully wrought mockery of everything from smoothie bars to Gary Barlow’s early solo career

Warm, funny and nostalgic enough to have you digging out your Global Hypercolor T-shirt and fluoro toweling socks

Raucously funny and achingly sad. Written with thrilling verve and wince-making acuity, The Adult marks Joe Stretch out as a unique and vital voice

Savage, hilarious, uncannily moving, and true. It's the first novel I've read that burns with all the madness, sadness and refracted terror of right now, and everyone should read it. Right now

This is a book which does more than just take you on a journey through the last twenty years. It also has a lot to say about family eccentricities, about childhood and adulthood and the difficulties faced in trying to be either, given the times we live alongside

The book is magnificent, understated, full of gentle mind grenades

Funny and rich and dirty and taut and original. I wanted it to be my biography, but there was way more warmth and invention in it than you could fit in a lifetime

Funny, sad, bewildering and painfully honest, it’s a must-read for all fans of Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine

What a beautifully written first novel. Joe Stretch has a way with words that is intensely captivating… Superb on adolescence, the Nineties, and more

A consistently amusing hymn to unfulfilled potential which grows more involving and poignant as it goes on

Jim is such a likeable character, unflinchingly recounting in all his worst failures and humiliations

A funny, wryly observed coming-of-age novel, it will strike a chord with anyone who grew up during the Noughties. It’s full of quirky period details and Jim is an engaging narrator

WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM PRIZE 
 
'Funny, sad, bewildering and painfully honest, it’s a must-read for all fans of Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine' Emerald Street 
 
Jim Thorne. 
He wants to understand love. 
His mum. 
Her three sisters have epic perms. 
And they’re famous. 
His dad. 
He is focused on a vital question: 
Mario or Sonic? 
It’s England, 1989–2009. 
So expect a little history. 
The dolphin's name is Dilly.

Joe Stretch

Praise for The Adult

The Adult is a tremendous novel. It takes its place with some of the very best of its genre – the right of passage. Very few people can do it well. Stretch has done it superbly well. I’m not surprised it won ...

Very funny, beautifully wrought

A properly bollock-droppingly brilliant novel

The Adult is a tremendous novel. It takes its place with some of the very best of its genre – the right of passage. Very few people can do it well. Stretch has done it superbly well. I’m not surprised it won ...

Very funny, beautifully wrought

A properly bollock-droppingly brilliant novel

The Adult is a tremendous novel. It takes its place with some of the very best of its genre – the right of passage. Very few people can do it well. Stretch has done it superbly well. I’m not surprised it won ...

Very funny, beautifully wrought

A properly bollock-droppingly brilliant novel

Books by Joe Stretch

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