Oxblood

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