Northern Sky

I hate to say it, but this is not very good – to put it kindly. Mark Radcliffe would be much better off sticking to his day job; his writing style is pedestrian, at best. I liked the setting – the much-derided and oft-forgotten world of the small-town folk club – but the protagonist was so unlikeable it was hard to care about him one way or another. There was one touch I liked very much – a scene where a reporter comes to write up the club. Anyone who's ever suffered through a 'Bam-whap-pow/beam me up Scotty!/OMG, all the women are fat!' write-up of a SF convention will feel an instant pang of recognition.

There is one memorable, even well-written, character - the ethereally anorexic Jeannie McDonald.
The rest are fairly forgettable. Radcliffe made it unnecessarily difficult for himself in his first novel by making his narrator a twerp.
Mark's self-deprecating autobiographies about life on the music scene are much better.But still, how much fiction is there about the English folk scene? I haven't come across any more and it's worth it for that alone for me.