Get our latest book recommendations, author news, and competitions right to your inbox.
Published by Zer0 Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
There is the day it happens, and then there is everything after.
Trav, thirteen, is trying to come to terms with the death of his father. Jay, Trav’s best friend, is tasked with going through a decade’s worth of writing that Trav wrote after finding his father dead. Stella, Trav’s mother, is trying to keep it together for her son while dealing with irreparable fallout in her adopted family. Together, they try to make sense of grief and its druggy comedown, and what happens when cursed destinies intersect. Powered by the prose — the rhythm and technique — of accent, sociolect, and place, this novel is working-class but not council-estate chic, grim but not grey, and blessed with a slangy Birmingham vernacular not readily found in modern fiction.
Trav, thirteen, is trying to come to terms with the death of his father. Jay, Trav’s best friend, is tasked with going through a decade’s worth of writing that Trav wrote after finding his father dead. Stella, Trav’s mother, is trying to keep it together for her son while dealing with irreparable fallout in her adopted family. Together, they try to make sense of grief and its druggy comedown, and what happens when cursed destinies intersect. Powered by the prose — the rhythm and technique — of accent, sociolect, and place, this novel is working-class but not council-estate chic, grim but not grey, and blessed with a slangy Birmingham vernacular not readily found in modern fiction.
Product Details
- Publisher: Zer0 Books (June 30, 2026)
- Length: 168 pages
- ISBN13: 9781803418544
Raves and Reviews
Trav is funny as fuck and fragile as glass. Rarely do you enter through the eyes and into the heart of a character with such unfiltered access, such vulnerability. But Travis Barnes — the novel's troubled but truthful anti-hero — is all the things that make us the brilliant, brutal, soft and stupid humans we are. Burns' writing, the kind I am endlessly, fruitlessly, in search of, is generous, but don't expect to come out unscathed, unshaken, unmoved. It is THE novel of New Birmingham, a place you think you know but probably, almost certainly do not. You will be closer after reading this. A working-class masterwork from one of the most stylish writers around.
– Clive Judd, author of Here
Trav is funny and fragile as glass. Rarely do you enter through the eyes and into the heart of a character with such unfiltered access, such vulnerability. But Travis Barnes — the novel's troubled but truthful anti-hero — is all the things that make us the brilliant, brutal, soft and stupid humans we are. Burns' writing, the kind I am endlessly, fruitlessly, in search of, is generous, but don't expect to come out unscathed, unshaken, unmoved. It is THE novel of New Birmingham, a place you think you know but probably, almost certainly do not. You will be closer after reading this. A working-class masterwork from one of the most stylish writers around.
– Clive Judd, author of Here
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
-
Book Cover Image (jpg): Trav
eBook 9781803418544
