I wrote a piece for Dazed about a pretty and moving book about love on council estates in December 2006:
Concerned with two adolescents on a sink estate in Middlesbrough, Richard Milward's Apples tells the story of Adam, a shy Beatles obsessive with OCD who is desperately in love with Eve, the pill-crunching, Bacardi Breezer-guzzling school beauty. Where this gem of a book distinguishes itself is in the charm, freshness and sheer humanity that the author brings to the characters. "I wanted the Middlesbrough in Apples to be colourful and manic and beautiful," Richard says. "It's got a terrible reputation really (you know, heroin, pollution, deprivation), but it's actually a very fun place to be."
Despite the miles of column inches spent discussing "the chav", actual, humane reports on what life is like growing up on an estate in Anthony Blair's Britain have been ridiculously thin on the ground. Apples, then, is a revelation. The "anti-Macho fairy tale," as Richard describes it, is told by a mixture of the two heroes – and they are that – but also a cast of drug dealers, date rapists, graffiti writers, butterflies, drug dealers, lampposts and unborn babies.
Apples will probably be described as Kes in day-glo or A Catcher in The Rye for Smiths fans, but this short, unassuming and charming first novel, half of which was written by Richard during art college and half while on the dole, stands in a class of its own. "In a way, I had a sort of double life mirroring Adam and Eve's," he says, "except I don't have to shut things all the time, and I've never been caught wanking in my attic."
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