Melissa is set in 1999-2000. At roughly 2pm on 9th June 1999, on a small street in Hanford, Stoke-on-Trent, a young girl dies of leukaemia; at almost the same moment, everyone on the street experiences the same musical hallucination. The novel is about this death and accompanying phenomenon – and about their after-effects, as the girl's family gradually disintegrates over the following year.
‘Melissa is an intricate kaleidoscope of a novel that explores the inevitable decay of bodies, of houses, of minds and of families. And the unexpected beauty of what comes after.’ —Jenn Ashworth
‘Melissa is such a successfully ambitious book that riffs and ranges through medicine, mathematics and music. It's a flight of darkly comic fancy that takes off from the solidity of a Midlands housing estate and fires its satiric barbs at every form of society's cant. It's reminiscent of a Burslem Beckett.’ —Desmond Barry