Oxblood

Critics Review

• With a brutal yet compassionate honesty, Oxblood confronts the past as it was and how it shapes who we are now, and confirms Tom Benn as one of the most powerful and urgent writers of our times

  DAVID PEACE, author of THE RED RIDING QUARTET

• The master of northern noir

  SUNDAY TIMES

• A rich archive of bygone badness

  THE TIMES

• An astonishing piece of work. Captures the stories of three women from an underworld family with ferocious honesty and compassion. Audacious writing – visceral, rich and intense. Unforgettable characters haunted by violence and grief. Exceptional

  CATH STAINCLIFFE

• Oxblood shows us that there are few places literature can’t take us, if the writer is brave enough, and gifted enough

  FRANCIS SPUFFORD

• Powerful stuff and so beautifully written – like David Peace wrote Alan Warner’s The Sopranos and so lyrical, too. You don’t care where it’s heading, you’re just happy to step into the flow and let it take you. Brilliant stuff – this is really very good indeed

  HARRIET TYCE

• Tom Benn is one of publishing’s best kept secrets. His story about the struggles of three generations of women in a Manchester crime clan has been rendered with such care and specificity that it feels wholly original. The result is a rich, dark, atmospheric family saga that contains so much buried love and anger and grief and sexual jealousy and bitter disappointment … I emerged from it exhilarated

  JOHANNA THOMAS-CORR

• If I read a better novel than Oxblood in 2022, it’ll be a blinding year for fiction. Tom Benn, please take a bow. Everybody else, please take note

  JOSEPH KNOX

• Reading Oxblood is a compelling and deeply unsettling experience; this is a novel that glitters with the dark energy and lifeblood of its characters

  NAOMI BOOTH

• A propulsive, bountiful, fearless work of art

  OYINKAN BRAITHWAITE

• What a voice Tom Benn has got, what a feel for character and place, and what an uncompromising approach he has to his subject and material. He’s gritty but totally empathetic, and inhabits his milieu of 1980s Manchester with total conviction and no attempt to soften the voices of his characters

  ANDREW HOLGATE

• A remarkable galvanization of a time and a place, its style and substance so rooted in one another it is impossible to imagine it being written by anyone else. A story that seeps into you, sentences turned to catch the light like night eyes. A living thing

  DOMINIC NOLAN, author of Vine Street

• One of those rare books where place and time are conjured so effortlessly, the cast of characters drawn with so much ease and grace

  MONA ARSHI

• More than anything, I was enamored with Benn’s audacity: to tell this raw, violent, compassionate story; to use language in such a thrilling and fresh way; to explore the dark hearts of ordinary people, and to not look way when things get messy; to be, basically, this good

  D W WILSON

• The gangland novel you have never read before, the one that gets inside the minds of three generations of women whose lives are bound to the crime lords of Wythenshawe by blood, flesh, fear, desire and a hunger for possession that cannot be contained in one lifetime. In a place where Mean Streets meets Most Haunted, with his hyper-intense, hallucinogenic prose, Benn will make you believe in ghosts

  CATHI UNSWORTH

• Oxblood is a book to get lost headlong in. Tom Benn manages to be heart-felt and attentive and generous, without ever resorting to being sentimental … This is a book of anti-sentimental greatness, wonderfully written, deft and pungent and sensuous … It is honest and truthful, but also a great feat of fiction

  STIG ABELL