the painter's friend

One of the books of the year. Cunnell's style is matchless: intimate, dark, sincere, wry and exquisitely beautiful.

Irish Times

Cunnell's prose is elegantly punchy in his novel about a working class artist . . . The valour of his fight is revealed in a story of what can happen when truth is considered idealism and collides with the predatory designs of a property developer. A fine book.
John Healy, author of The Grass Arena

Loving in its exploration of creative survival and loss of human habitat. Every fleck and dab of verbal pigment rewards the eye and enriches the design.

Adam Mars-Jones, author of Box Hill

What a fine book this is. At times, a beautiful meditation, at other times the prose ripples with tension and foreboding. Howard Cunnell is a wonderful writer who should be read by everyone.
Sarah Winman, author of Still Life

 

Uncompromising but bleakly beautiful.. The Painter's Friend shares many qualities with the greatest, grittiest chronicles of English working class life.. it also possesses something of the hallucinatory power of a Joseph Conrad fever dream or a parable by Kafka.. A huge achievement.

Stephen Ellcock, author of England on Fire