Neil Rollinson has previously published four well-received volumes of poetry, but ‘The Dead Don’t Bleed’ is his first novel. It begins in 2003 in the city of Córdoba in southern Spain. Frank is visiting the grave of his wife, Lucía, who had died a number of years earlier. Born in Newcastle, Frank is also visiting Spain for a couple of other reasons: he’s doing research for a book he’s writing about Federico García Lorca – the great Spanish poet. He’s also recently discovered the whereabouts of his brother, Gordon, who fled to Spain decades ago, funding his getaway with the proceeds of a botched robbery. Frank needs to tell Gordon about the recent death of their father, Laurence, who was once one of Newcastle’s most fearsome gangsters; but he also wants to get some answers. The narrative then continues to jump backwards and forwards in time to let us see the brothers at various points in their lives: playing together on holiday collecting crabs in Scotland, perhaps; or, later, trying to dispose of a body. With their mother dead, they’re ruled by the misogynistic Laurence who is often abusive to the boys, particularly Gordon. It’s a brutal upbringing, enacted under a fiercely sexist milieu, and ‘The Dead Don’t Bleed’ proffers the notion that it’s not just women who suffer under patriarchy, but men; particularly men who are told they must act like men. At the novel’s close, it wasn’t a line from Lorca that came to mind, but Larkin: Man hands on misery to man / It deepens like a coastal shelf. RM

Published by Vintage