The latest addition to my website is Glen James Brown‘s Ironopolis. This is a superb first novel, set in a sink estate in the North of England. We follow seven main characters (and a host of others) as they struggle with their lives – drugs, failed relationships, the regeneration of the estate, violence. However, Brown is a skilled writer and it is not all the miseries of a sink estate but also about they cope with their environment, with one another and even with Peg Powler, an evil water sprite. There are a few plot lines – abducted girls, an artist who apparently sees Peg Powler and then paints her, characters who fall down a well and those who get caught up in a spiral of violence – which make this much more of a complex and very readable novel.