Overview

Andrew McDonnell tunes his attention to milk floats, care homes, dead hedgehogs, Anglo Saxon skulls and suburban patios, finding in each a pressure point of class, memory and affection. Organised as a series of secular prayers to things of this earth, these lyrical prose poems insist upon working class experience in a world perpetually haunted by what is erased. Across Kent lanes and East Anglian flatlands, these devotionals chart a working-class childhood that grows into uncertain adulthood and tender fatherhood, carrying with it council houses, caravan holidays, call centres and the long shadow of the 11+ plus in a distinctly English landscape. McDonnell writes of dads who whistle through precarity, boys who become ""bookish lumps"", men who wrestle goats and grief, children singing in bathrooms while history and austerity close in at the edges. The result is a moving, intricate act of remembrance that refuses to let people, places or feelings be quietly tidied away. Intimate and expansive at once, 55 Devotionals (Against Erasure) is both love letter and ledger, a book that insists the so-called little things are what keep a life from being rubbed out.

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9781917617581

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Reviews

Andrew McDonnell's 55 Devotionals (Against Erasure) is a charged and tender evocation of working-class experiences which centres on what's revealed through intimate acquaintance with weight and texture, with a grandfather's buttons, woodlice, iron bridges. Here, one male body becomes 'a haunted house being gentrified', another a defiant gingerbread boy on the run, dodging jaws and holding down a job to make a family. Throughout, McDonnell's keen eye unlocks the day-to-day to find transcendence, 'the opening of doors everywhere.' - John McCullough

Author Information

Andrew McDonnell was born in Shoreham, Kent, in 1977. He writes poetry and fiction and has written a Creative Writing handbook, Our Story Needs Your Story: Writing Working Class Experience (Story Machine, 2026). He lives in Norwich but lectures at University Centre Peterborough in English Literature and Creative Writing.

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