Keshed

by Stu Hennigan

In the derelict shell of what was once his family home, a dying man surveys the wreckage of his former life and drinks himself senseless, haunted by the chain of events that led him there.

Dark, complex and visceral, Keshed is an unflinching character study exploring class, belonging, fatherhood and conflicting ideals of modern masculinity.

At heart it's the story of a relationship struggling to cope with the impossible pressures of raising a child under late-stage capitalism; but it's also a love letter to the working class North, from the grinding poverty of Thatcher's 80's to the present day.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction

400 pages, Paperback

Published February 12, 2026

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entered for the 2027 Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize by Ortac Press

He sat on the same bench drinking a bag of cans one Sunday teatime last year utterly keshed, doing corner kicks of a credit card with one wreckhead drug buddies and literally laughed till he puked when the guy stripped to his skids and dived in headfirst, two coked-up to do anything but doggy paddle in the stagnant wash while the tourists in the restaurant round the back of the bougie chippy stared open-mouthed through the windows and choked on their fish suppers, a couple of them pointing and taking photos with their phones.

Keshed by Stu Hennigan is the February 2026 book from the highly recommended Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month club, which raises funds that support the UKs most exciting annual book prize, the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize, as well as showcasing a collection of books from the vibrant small independent press scene. Stu Hennigan himself a judge for this year's prize.

The novel is published by Ortac Press "an independent publisher of non-fiction and novels. We publish books to captivate and illuminate."

The novel is told by Sean Molloy, who was born in 1981, and is in two interspersed sections Then and Now.

The Then sections are told in a form of innovative, and searingly intense, prose poetry - the opening chapter best experienced in print format at Minor Literatures here

Sean is now on his own, lost in alcohol induced nausea, his life wrecked by the events he narrates in the Now sections.

rancid liquid squirting chin soggy torso peristaltic rush rapid breath spit reset deep slow in and out and in and out in and out got to keep it down; guts crease pain stabs needles knives fetid bargain basement raw spirit choking gasping fighting sucking air like life itself convulsing waves eyes nose pouring tears snot hacking coughing puke spatters weakly wet cotton sticky chest hair halfawake fully drunk trapped gyroscopic blur unfixed centre ceaseless motion breathless sickness
going
going
one
more
heave
FUCK
d e e p b r e a t h
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin
and
gone

A recording of the author performing from this opening section - which demands to be read aloud by the reader as well - can he found on his Substack.

The Then section is mainly more conventional, but equally powerful. It tells Sean's story, switching from close third to second person (Sean telling his story to himself). It's a story of both modern masculinity and of class - young Sean too bright for his first school and not man enough for his father, but not middle-class enough for his grammar or for Manchester University, where the other students are mainly from more privileged Southern backgrounds, and where he socialises in the local clubs rather than student bars.

Your favourite ever night from uni was the time you sat till the small hours, wrecked on snakebite and black and a wrap of disgusting Chickentown speed in the corner of the Fishbowl room, copping off with a lass who looked like an extra from a Jack Off Jill video who was over from Preston celebrating her eighteenth birthday. You were hoping to take her back to the flat but before you could suggest it she was abducted from you by the mates she'd come with who dragged your dark princess unwillingly away to get the last train while Type O Negative hammered your eardrums with their tune about loving the dead.

Post uni he first works on a building site, then in a dead-end job in the housing benefit office, his drinking becoming increasingly problematic. But one night he meets Mandy, again from a more priviliged background but a kindred spirit in many respects and the two move in together, Sean trying to curb, and when he can't, at least hide, his ways.

Mandy is keen to start a family, but the baby comes very early and the book's most moving passages are set in the hospital as their tiny daughter Daisy battles for her life. But Sean, while trying to stay outwardly strong, is wracked by negativity and self-doubt, expressed in stream-of-consciousness inner thoughts:

good front youre putting on it cunt but you wont be able to keep it up how can you youre so fucking freaked you keep thinking your hearts going to stop which it is you cant ignore me ah know your game you want to step outside disassociate pretend youre not you so you can watch this truckload of shit dumped on some other poor cunts head but you cant fool me ahm still here even if youre blagging yourself that emaciated wreck of a pathetic excuse of a human is anyone else youre nothing but a shitscared little boy playing at being a man like youve done since you were a kid you cant fool everyone forever so why bother trying youll fail at it like youve failed at every other fucking thing youve ever attempted mental disintegration cunt stand in the corner then ahll come with you we can watch together while you-

And one life settles down, he undergoes therapy and treatment for his depression:

Okay, Mr Molloy, let's take it steady. When was the first time you remember feeling like this?

He laid it out then. All of it. A torrent of shit. Once the gate opened there was no stopping. He told her about the nightmares so vivid he'd wake up screaming the house down, the hundred TVs tuned to different channels playing at the same time all the time in his brain so he couldn't hold a thought for longer than a few seconds even though somehow he could follow them all in detail while thinking he was focused on none. He talked about bath towels ruined soaking up the mess from wounds that bled so much he could have puked, hiding them in the bottom of the bin when his folks were at work; sweltering long-sleeved summers hiding his blind butcher's work, a six-foot boy with an eight-stone body, too sad too eat, too scared to talk, who hated the whole shitcunt world and its granny almost as much as he hated himself.

As the Then passages suggest, this is not a novel driving to a happy ending but a blistering and incandescent work.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

rancid liquid squirting chin soggy torso peristaltic rush rapid breath spit reset deep slow in and out and in and out in and out got to keep it down guts crease pain stabs needles knives fetid bargain basement raw spirit choking gasping fighting sucking air like life itself convulsing waves eyes nose pouring tears snot hacking coughing puke spatters weakly wet cotton sticky chest hair halfawake fully drunk trapped gyroscopic blur unfixed centre ceaseless motion breathless sickness

The debut novel of a writer, poet and musician from the North of England.

Its protagonist is Sean Molloy – born in 1981 to a working class family, but who goes first to the local Grammar School (where he is looked down on for his family background and not quite right uniform) and then to Manchester University (where he feels out of place among the mainly Southern and middle class students), he drifts back to his home town working on a building site before he meets Mandy (again from a Southern middle class background – but who stayed on in Manchester with her best friend Poppy and works at a café finding no demand for her arts degree).

The structure of the book is effectively three fold.

Short but searing stream of consciousness sections labelled as “Now” and innovatively typeset – we quickly realise that Sean is alone, suffering with a severe hangover (the opening section capturing this brilliantly) and approaching a crisis among the wreckage of his life.

More (but not entirely) conventional narrative sections labelled as “Then” which tell Sean’s stories in two separate sections.

Conventionally numbered sections, written in third person which progress chronologically forward and tell of Sean’s relationship with Mandy and the development of his life up to the point at which the “Now” sections start – revealing over time the story of what has lead him to his current predicament. A constant in these sections is Sean’s mental health struggles which manifest as and are magnified by his alcoholism.

Sections with chapter titles, told in a second person (effectively by Sean to himself) and which tell of the family, student and childhood backstory which lead him to the point at which he meant Mandy – sections which in effect and to great effect proceed chronologically backward as we see Sean’s conflicted relationship with a traditional father, his difficulty family history (including a family history of both mental and alcohol struggles), his own self-harming and so on. The last of these sections “Baggage Handling” is a particularly effective series of old-photo-induced memories.

The author has described the novel as a “love letter to working class Northerns” – and in some ways while class and region are a key part of the novel (one could imagine it the first book listed if Cambridge English-Graduate Andy Burnham decides to set up a new Booker of the North) the novel (after a strong start) started to grate on me as another example of the false confluence that literary fiction (particularly the Irish Craic Cocaine genre) appears to make between working class characters and substance abuse (but without the inventive language of that genre). There is only so much drinking or drug taking I can normally take in a novel – particularly when it is somehow presented as “normal” – and my quota was exceeded around a third of the way into what is nearly a 400 page novel.

But then for me the novel took off as Mandy and Sean (now in a formal relationship, Sean attempting to hold down a job in the Housing Office) plan a family – the resulting very premature birth of their daughter Daisy testing their finances, relationship and Sean’s mental health to the limit, with the latter brilliantly captured in a series of italic set second party paragraphs representing the accusatory voice in Sean’s head pointing out his inadequacies (and haunted by in effect PTSD form the events of Daisy’s birth).

And from there the book is convincing, harrowing and moving as well as engrossing – I felt fully vested in Sean as a character and the fate of he, Mandy and their child Daisy.

And with a writer, poet and musician from the North of England – in Jarvis Cocker – on the Booker judging panel I would not rule this out of what I think would be a deserved longlisting – and the Goldsmith Prize must also be a possibility.

good front youre putting on it c_ but you wont be able to keep it up how can you youre so f_ freaked you keep thinking your hearts going to stop which it is you cant ignore me ah know your game you want to step outside disassociate pretend youre not you so you can watch this truckload of s_ dumped on some other poor c_ head but you cant fool me abm still here even if youre blagging yourself that emaciated wreck of a pathetic excuse of a human is anyone else youre nothing but a s_scared litle boy playing at being a man like youve done since you were a kid you cant fool everyone forever so why bother trying youll fail at it like youve failed at every other f_ thing youve ever attempted mental disintegration c_ stand in the corner then ahll come with you we can watth together while you—

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This kind of novel is why I read. Only a working-class librarian with ADHD could write the relentless, searing, and beautifully crafted debut novel that is Keshed. Hennigan manages to make his experiments with language and narrative form accessible and purposeful; these are executed with the mastery of an old hand and are frankly astonishing in a debut novel. Characterisation is engagingly complex for the protagonist Sean and his close circle. Sean is damaged and brave, calculating and vulnerable, selfless and self-sabotaging. All those who care for him are flawed yet sympathetic, and those who don’t are afforded deft and rounded presentation. There is a sense of rootedness in recent history and specific northern locations. Above all, the narrative voices are richly resonant. Sean’s own turn of phrase is frequently laugh out loud funny, and possesses a rhythmic churn in keeping with the relentless pace of his inner emotional and mental life as he spins the plates of marriage, parenthood, work, paranoia, addiction, depression and trauma. Another, kinder, voice traces Sean’s youth in the second person, and these are interspersed with a shattered internal commentary on an hour or so of present tense action. These voices lead like paths up different sides of a hill to the climactic moment – one which delivers on every level. There’s something of the Greek tragedy about the emotional journey Keshed takes you on – perhaps it’s the sense of unpredictable inevitability combined with its deep compassion for flawed humanity. Here’s hoping this is the first of many Hennigan novels.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This account of a life destroyed by an addiction to alcohol is pretty unrelenting. I found the copious amounts of alcohol consumed throughout the novel to be pretty hard to take.

It does have a devastating ending though

[Christine Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keshed is a relentless portrait of addiction and collapse, told through fractured voices and a claustrophobic “then/now” structure. Hennigan’s writing is visceral and uncompromising, pulling the reader into Sean’s downward spiral with a mix of brutality and bleak poetry. I found it exhausting to read — deliberately so, I think — and at times I just wanted it to be over. That in itself says something about the book’s power: it makes you feel the compulsion, the repetition, the sickening drag of addiction.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning debut. Raw, visceral, real. Don't think I'll read much better this year.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the surface, Ketched is the story of a man trying and (repeatedly, self-sabotagingly) failing to conform to the roles prescribed to him: son, student, worker bee, partner, father, man. But the reasons for his failures are many, and they're not all his fault--nor does he always fail. The protagonist is Sean Molloy, a man both profoundly at odds with his world and a product of it: a loner craving connection, a could-be-good bloke held back by inner demons who mock him when he's up and kick him when he's down, a working-class kid who has been trained either to suppress his feelings (because that's what men do) or deaden his feelings with pills and (especially) pills, a cog in the neo-post-Thatcherite machine, an incorrigible fuckup you either want to shake by his scrawny neck or subject to a really long hug.

Stu Hennigan is a breathtaking writer - and by that I mean I'm not sure he ever pauses for breath. The voices (there are several) are pell-mell, relentless, funny, and brutal. While I was reading it, I found my own inner monologue (polite, middle-class, American) taking on the slang and cadences and profanities (so many profanities!) of Sean's north-of-England working-class speech. This isn't a book for the faint of heart--it doesn't hold back on the horrors--nor for those who might be put off by experiments in form and format (the design of the book, inside and out, is exquisite). But it is the kind of book that'll grab you by the shoulders and squeeze until you really FEEL something, which is of course one of the primary functions of art.

[Rachel Bannister · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly well written but difficult read. Will stay with me for a long time

[Jamad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Keshed is told through alternating Then and Now sections. The Now chapters are a stream-of-consciousness, alcohol-induced rant, for want of a better word. Thankfully, they’re generally quite short. The Then chapters tell Sean’s story and gradually reveal how he reached that point.

I suspect my tolerance for endless pages of drinking, drug-taking and self-inflicted chaos is lower than that of many readers who have rated this highly. The writing certainly captures the relentless cycle Sean finds himself in, but after a while I felt I was simply reading different versions of the same scene. Once I’d got the point, I wasn’t sure there was much more to be gained by returning to it again and again.

As always, I rate books on one thing above all else: how much I enjoyed reading them. This one was just okay for me. There is ability here, and I can see exactly why it has found its audience, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that we’ve been here before. Troubled young men, drink, drugs, self-destruction and regret are hardly unexplored literary territory, and Keshed never quite did enough to convince me it had something new to add.

[Marvin Michaels · Rating 4 out of 5]

What hooked me was the storyline's refusal to separate the good from the damage. Life, love and abuse aren't tidy chapters here; they bleed into each other. A relationship buckles under the strain of raising a child on almost nothing. Addiction sits in the corner of every room. And still, the love is real, which is what makes the collapse hurt.

This is a heavy book about masculinity, fatherhood and men's mental health, and it doesn't offer easy redemption. It offers honesty instead. For a debut novel, that's a remarkable thing to pull off.

Brutal, tender and worth every bruise. If you can handle the weight, this one stays with you.

[Michael Jarvie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zola Is A Loiner!

The point of view in Keshed alternates between close third person and second person, the latter employed to narrate earlier periods in the protagonist’s life, stretching all the way back to his childhood. To visually represent this shift in narrative perspective, typographically and in big block letters, the words NOW and THEN are each spread out over two full pages at regular intervals throughout the book. But to me, at least, those two words also suggest the typical Northern greeting, “Now, then!”

Be warned, there’s an absence of speech marks in Keshed, in the manner of Cormac McCarthy, which can be confusing at times, though on balance it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the experienced reader. This is also true of the lack of apostrophes in words like “we’ll” and “she’ll.” When they crop up in the italicised passages of the narrator’s self-accusing persona, the novel renders them as “well” and “shell”.

As for the vocabulary, working-class idioms are commonplace throughout Keshed, for example “rollies” (hand-rolled cigarettes), “compo” (the mortar used in bricklaying and sometimes employed to refer to a mixture of plaster used to skim plasterboard), and there are also regional dialectal forms, such as “keshed” (stoned or drunk) “kaffle” (to fall asleep suddenly), “mardy” (grumpy) “mithered” (bothered) “radged” (crazy).

Its choice of characteristically working-class locations and artefacts marks the physical world, e.g. Spoons (as in the pub chain Wetherspoons), Greggs, Booze Busters, and Frosty Jack’s (a brand of strong, cheap cider). The location is Leeds, and actual place names are employed, e.g. Harold Terrrace, Otley Road.

Throughout, the prose is beautifully shaped. A broken football, for instance, “has holes in the sides and the rubber orange bladder sticking out like a haemorrhoid” and then there are the “rusty redorange [railway] tracks branching out like spiders’ legs”. I can easily visualise both.

The protagonist, Sean Molloy, attempts to deal with his deep-seated psychological problems by self-harming, and has a mania for drinking to excess and taking drugs (the latter primarily represented by weed, cocaine, ketamine, acid, and ecstasy). At regular intervals, he is prone to expressing his negative feelings in a self-accusatory interior monologue that switches to the second person and is also italicised to differentiate it from the third-person narrator. I should add that the book opens with a staccato stream of consciousness, as unpunctuated as Molly Bloom’s monologue in the final chapter of Ulysses. There’s only so much of this you can tolerate before it becomes tedious and repetitive, unless you’re James Joyce, that is. Fortunately, Sean’s stream of consciousness doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Almost suggestive of Emile Zola and his notion of how heredity shapes his characters’ destiny, we learn that Sean’s uncle Tez was prone to alcoholism, which eventually hospitalised him, and one could make the case that Sean, who is also predisposed to self-harm and alcoholism, shares the same genetic inheritance. Later, we learn of another relative, Sean’s cousin Hayley, who meets a tragic end as a result of her own self-destructive nature.

Sean ends up studying for a degree in Modern History at Manchester University, though he never shows any genuine enthusiasm for his subject. After graduating with a 2:1, he’s employed as a general labourer on a building site, as a van driver and later as an office worker. During a prolonged bender with his pal Rob, Sean strikes up a relationship with Amanda (Mandy) who works in a cafe. This comes as quite a surprise, and doesn’t really fit with what we already know of Sean’s morose and insular personality, given that he had studiously avoided forming any friendships with his fellow flatmates and other students on his course, and was pretty much an antisocial loner. Altogether, his protestations that he was unable to find anyone at university from a working-class background like himself strike this reader as rather feeble and unconvincing.

Social class matters a great deal in Keshed and is referenced throughout. At Leeds train station, for example, Sean disparagingly refers to the commuters as “worker bees” and “drones”, his exploitative landlord is a “parasite” and his boss on the building site is a “cantankerous, slave-driving shitehawk”. Politically, the bailout of the bankers during the 2008 economic crash and the David Cameron/Nick Clegg coalition government are both mentioned in predictably negative terms.

What’s more, it soon transpires that Mandy is thoroughly middle class and hails from Surrey, that affluent region comprising what Sean calls “Daily Heil” readers – witness his confusion when she uses the word “panini”, which to her is something utterly familiar, but not to him. In Sean’s world, such an item of food would be called a toasted sarnie. Then there’s Amanda’s flatmate, Poppy, who is descended from old money. The name alone tells you this is someone who is from a very well-to-do background. Yet Sean is soon necking bottles of wine with her.

Becoming a father is hardly the sort of thing that you feel is going to help Sean overcome his personal demons. And when his daughter, Daisy, is born prematurely, his life predictably spirals out of control. For this reader, the chapters devoted to Daisy’s time in the hospital intensive care unit felt as if they dragged on for too long, though another reader might disagree with this verdict. The denouement is as violent as anything you’d find in Zola, and just like Zola it’s rather contrived, but then that’s what literature is all about.

Ortac Press has done a terrific job with the cover design of the book and its handling of the text. As someone who used to work as a freelance editor and proofreader, I noticed only five errors: on page 68 it reads, “you cant blame for her that” instead of “you cant blame her for that”; there’s a missing full stop on page 302; on page 308 it reads, “she was going get him fired” instead of “she was going to get him fired”; on page 315 it reads, “she’d dead nice” instead of “she’s dead nice”; and on page 324 it reads “too sad too eat” instead of “too sad to eat”. Five minor errors in a work of this length is not only perfectly acceptable, but also comparable with the output of much bigger traditional publishers.

If you are interested in contemporary working-class literature, then Keshed is definitely worthy of your attention.

[Bodies in the Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stu Hennigan’s Keshed is rightly being hailed as the next Great Working Class Novel, and speaking as a member of the working class with an English degree I can affirm it ticks all the boxes - protagonist who works to live but finds life hard and getting harder; grim setting; big hearted but narrow-minded minor characters; drink, drugs and an overwhelming sense of not fitting in - either with the people at home or the middle classes at uni and beyond.

Written stream of consciousness, the narrative could be breathless, but structure has been provided by breaking up the body of the text about “THEN” with short segments on “NOW” when main character Sean Molloy is living in the wreckage of his life and drinking himself to reckless oblivion.

There’s a horrible twist at the end of the “THEN” that makes sense of why he’s given up on any chance at happiness or even sobriety. Nevertheless this is a novel about family and what it means to love from deep within a well of despair and behind a bell jar that ultimately proves too heavy to lift and escape.

Sean meets Mandy young enough that his life could be something wonderful and for a time it is - his version of wonderful anyway. He finds the greatest love of his life when their daughter Daisy arrives dangerously early and we learn all about the rhythms of life in ICU and then the High Dependency Unit. It’s hard to think of a novel that praises the NHS so highly, as we watch skilled medical staff get Mandy and Sean ready to take their miracle baby home.

Meanwhile, Sean’s GP is struggling to help him contain his depression. The drugs don’t work - not for very long anyway - and soon he’s self-medicating and anaesthetizing himself the way he always has, boozing in front of the telly, and in front of Daisy.

Trigger warnings galore for this novel - but nothing is gratuitous and most of it is even cathartic. Ultimately, catharsis is the raison d’être of this novel after all.

Read it if you like character-driven stories and experimental language; if you’ve ever been a working class kid trying to survive a world optimised for the middle classes; or if you’re a human exploring what humanity means.

Read it.

[Andy Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though this is well written, it is relentlessly bleak. It follows a young man, Sean, drinking himself towards oblivion amid the wreckage of his past. Set in the late 1990s, it captures the class divisions of the time, addiction and alcoholism in a ferocious Yorkshire vernacular. The narration shifts between voices with unsettling ease. The prose is vivid, rhythmic and often darkly funny, but there is little light here, and the book asks a lot of its reader emotionally.

Accidents, bad timing and circumstances beyond anyone's control shape these lives far more than choice or merit. Later in the book I think this is out of place. The story has already made its point, and the final pages dilute rather than deepen its impact. Even so, it's a powerful, uncompromising read.

[Lesley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have been a higher rating if not for the lazy ending which invalidated much of what came before.
Ultimately, I found it a frustrating read that tried to be too many things at once, ending up a disjointed muddled metaphor.
Shame, it could have been so much more.

[Alex Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning debut novel from Stu Hennigan which provides an incredibly dark and unflinching look into class, addiction, masculinity and the pressures of everyday life. A very heavy and bleak read, but definitely worth it

[Georgie · Rating 3 out of 5]

god this is so fucking miserable

[Adrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was really unpleasant being in Sean’s head for 350 pages but by god I won’t forget it