"Sperm tests, wild-goose chases and lashings of warm and quirky English humour." -Harpers & Queen Felix loves his wife Abbie. Abbie wants a baby. So Felix, not unaware of the thunderous ticking of Abbie's biological clock, wants to oblige - but their home has still to be blessed. Cue the usual round of doctors, tests, probes and scans - all to no avail. Adopted at birth herself, Abbie decides that if she can't have a child, then she must at least discover whose child she is. Soon, she and Felix are caught up in a make-or break search for family, identity and meaning. But neither of them can have any idea quite where the journey will take them... "With plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, touchy-feely bits and some choice observations about the things that men do, Armitage gives Homby a run for his money." -Daily Mirror "The laconic unshockable humour of Armitage's poems persists through most of The White Stuff... He has painful and truthful things to show about work, love, men." -Independent "Every detail of the small-town Northern settings rings true... his depiction of a marriage under strain gives the book considerable poignancy." -Maire Claire "Endearing, enjoyable...a jolly good read." -Big Issue
Author
Simon Armitage, whose The Shout was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, has published ten volumes of poetry and has received numerous honors for his work. He was appointed UK Poet Laureate in 2019 Armitage's poetry collections include Book of Matches (1993) and The Dead Sea Poems (1995). He has written two novels, Little Green Man (2001) and The White Stuff (2004), as well as All Points North (1998), a collection of essays on the north of England. He has produced a dramatised version of Homer's Odyssey and a collection of poetry entitled Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus The Corduroy Kid (which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize), both of which were published in July 2006. Many of Armitage's poems appear in the AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) GCSE syllabus for English Literature in the United Kingdom. These include "Homecoming", "November", "Kid", "Hitcher", and a selection of poems from Book of Matches, most notably of these "Mother any distance...". His writing is characterised by a dry Yorkshire wit combined with "an accessible, realist style and critical seriousness."
