Talk of the Town, By Jacob Polley

"It's best if yer don't know the time," Arthur advises his friend Chris, but Chris feels most at home cocooned in the telephone booth, and it is here that he goes to kill time by calling the speaking clock. But then Arthur vanishes, prompting Chris to make fretful phone calls to his missing friend's mother. In a first-person narrative that credibly conjures the local Carlisle dialect of this motley crew of characters, Jacob Polley, an award-winning poet, crafts a compelling plot that reveals how fraught lines of miscommunication have devastating effect.

Time seems to stretch as relentlessly as the landscape of the hometown from which these restless teens yearn to escape. Their days are measured out by cups of sweet tea, coins slipped through slot machines, and glimpses of girls' knickers. But the apathy leads to disturbing anomie. Polley unflinchingly patrols the moral borders – and boredom – at which vulnerable young minds might be tipped into violence, as Chris finds himself almost literally on a knife's edge and must learn what it is to feel pain. Talk of the Town is about youngsters testing emotional, geographical and temporal limits, dramatically involved in events which unfold in the eerie space between days. Polley's beguiling prose style tests the limits of language, blending lyricism with brutality; juxtaposing tenderness with vicious criminality.

This is a disconcerting debut novel about how meaning is constructed from murmur, gossip and half-truth. These are lives filled with excess noise ("the roar in me own head", the screams of a dying man) but it is what is not said that becomes most haunting, as Polley eloquently depicts the frustrations of inarticulacy, words stumbling on the tips of the tongues of his characters in a "silent madness". Capturing the chaotic rhythms of these young lives in vivid yet unsentimental prose, Polley hits the perfect pitch.