About to Fall Apart

by Ashley Hickson-Lovence

AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW

'Poignant and tender.' FERDIA LENNON
'A dynamic voice.' IRENOSEN OKOJIE
'Lushly written and formally audacious . . . moving.' NICOLAS PADAMSEE

This is the story of one man's weekend, a weekend in which everything could change

These lines could change everything /
He sips more of his tinny /
Imagines a new life

Aidy's just punched a co-worker, but he hasn't got time to deal with the fallout. With a deadline fast looming he must get home, knuckle down and finish the story he's been working on, a story he hasn't been able to stop thinking about. It's the story of a falling plane and of a grieving mother.

Set across one weekend, About to Fall Apart is the exhilarating story of a man of mixed heritage - living on the Irish border - as he tries to stay positive, reconnect with his children and maybe, even, find his own birth mother.

Genres: Fiction

Kindle Edition

Expected publication April 7, 2026

About the author

Ashley Hickson-Lovence was born in London in 1991 and is a former secondary school English teacher with a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia. His debut novel, The 392, was released in April 2019 and his second novel, Your Show, was released in April 2022. His third book, a YA-in-verse called Wild East, is released with Penguin in May 2024.

Reviews

[Bukola Akinyemi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wordplay on the page, every single line a punchline.

If you love words, the poetic use of words, their placement on a page, the way they convey meaning and extract emotions, sensory language, you will absolutely adore About to Fall Apart by Ashley Hickson-Lovence.

At the heart of this book is the story of Aidy, a sixty-six year old mixed heritage man who grew up with a loving adoptive family but desperately longs to meet his birth mother.

This longing is hurts more than the grief of losing someone to death. It’s the grief of his mother not wanting to find him.

Aidy is an author writing a story about a footballer who died in a plane crash. The footballer’s mum is grieving the death of her son.

Aidy lives alone but has his three children visit. We read about his relationship with his grown children and their mothers. The women on his life past and present. His relationship with his work colleagues and the experience of being observed as different.

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

but Aidy is used to it now / hell be seventy soon / being a man of mixed heritage here in this island of Ireland / half-caste / a half-breed / as he used to be called by many when he was young / he can't not notice that little look / the not-so-subtle double-take people do when they see him enter certain spaces / a millisecond of hesitation / so small it's unnoticeable to the untrained eye / but as a man of colour / Aidy knows there's sometimes more to it / it's not just here at Dulrush Lodge / not just here straddling the borderlands of Belleek / & it's not necessarily this young girl's fault / it's just how it is really / & Aidy knows it's worse in other countries / has seen it for himself working all over the world / & that's why he never really complains / not with his mouth anyway / but today / especially with his kids with him / & after what happened yesterday at St Angelo / he's feeling a little more sensitive than usual / of course it's not just here / it could be in the local Spar / or the local library / it's heavy / the burden of being a Black man sometimes / his head hurts / his heart hurts / his hand hurts

 
The novelist, poet, literary critic and Creative Writing Lecturers third adult novel – his second “Your Show”, a fictionalised biography of Uriah Rennie (the first black referee in the Premier League) was Gordon Burn longlisted and East Anglia Book Award shortlisted – and this book too has a football theme underlying it (and an Arsenal-Manchester Utd match playing out on the last of the three days in which it is set).
 
Told in a distinct style – short phrases separated by “/” – the novel tells the story of Aidy.  Born in the 1950s to an Irish mother and black father, he was given up for adoption before one but ended in foster care.  In the book, and in his late sixties, and working as an odd-job man at a local small airfield.  Three times married and three times separated (and with a child from each marriage) he has an internet relationship with a Ukrainian lady in what he thinks may be a scam.
 
At the book’s opening he is driving form work after having punched a man who made a racist comment (the n-word) and unsure if he still has a job plans to spend the weekend writing a 5000 word story for a short story prize (his literary career so far limited to a self-published and barely sold poetry collection).  His subject is a fictionalised account of the real-life death of the Argentinian footballer Emilino Sala (who died in a light aircraft crash en route from Nantes to sign for Cardiff) – which starts with the aircraft and then features Sala’s mother as she has to deal not just with the loss of her son but the subsequent death of her husband. 
 
Aidy himself still has never known his mother – although he did trace his father to Grenada a few years before – despite writing to an address he was given for her; and of course we know that Sala’s story is a way of trying to explore how a mother might react to losing her child.
 
But his plans are slightly thwarted when his youngest child – a daughter just hitting 16 – arrives for one of her stays (which he had forgotten) followed by his middle son – but the three of them have a Sunday brunch at the restaurant where his oldest son (with who he has had a breach since Aidy’s reaction to finding he was in a serious gay relationship) works – enabling him to have one of the few times he has had his children together.  
 
Overall, I thought this was an excellent novel (almost novella) and I was very impressed when I checked the author and realised that while he has part Grenadian and Irish descent he is both English based and much younger than a protagonist in Aidy that he appears to capture with genuine insight.
 
My thanks to Faber for an ARC via NetGalley
 

didn't manage to get any sleep in the eight or so hours it took to get there / & he felt as lost as ever from the moment he landed / his light-ish skin marking him out as an outsider / neither this nor that / somewhere in between / it's similar back in Belleek / the village straddles the border / history cuts right through / a line through the bridge / north vs south / & Aidy straddles a border of his own / a halfway house / between black & white / Irish & non-Irish / past & present / from the moment he stepped off the plane just outside St Georges there was a swelling strangeness / a sweltering of something not quite right / hard to put into words / for a start everything was more