Fiction Category Winner in the 2022 East Anglian Book Awards

Some of the characters in Stewkey Blues have lived in Norfolk all their lives. Others are short-term residents or passage migrants. Whether young or old, self-confident or ground-down, local or blow-in, all of them are reaching uneasy compromises with the world they inhabit and the landscape in which that life takes place.

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Famed though it is for its flatness, Norfolk is a county of manifold aspects, many of which are captured in these sharp, subtle new stories by native son DJ Taylor. They all emerged from 2020’s lockdown, and together delineate the region’s geographical and social range, occasionally squinting back in time and tuning in to mythical echoes.

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The wide variety of experiences explored keeps this collection fresh and of interest. The author writes with elan as he excavates the core of the human condition. The reader is left hoping that Norfolk avoids the encroaching homogeny of modern expansionism. Each story provides a highly enjoyable and still lingering read.

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There's urban ennui and dead-end lives in the suburbs of Norwich, loneliness in a caravan park outside Thetford; social codes traduced in a village near Shopham; and wild shotgun-toting lawlessness in the wilds of Breckland. Taylor has a gimlet eye for the telling detail and enjoys the oddity of Norfolk's eccentrics, those born and bred among its flat farmlands, and those attracted to the place like iron filings to a magnet.

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DJ Taylor’s Stewkey Blues is set not only in the (culturally and geographically) different territory of Norfolk, but in a different time too. Several of his tales are set in the 20th century and his tone and points of reference across the collection are redolent of this era. His characters namecheck The Wind in the Willows and Top of the Pops, PG Wodehouse and the Benny Hill Show. People dating are ‘walking out’ together; the new Bill Bryson is ‘jolly good’. The collection’s realm is the provincial domestic: the middle managers, shop owners, minor public school boys and lesser gentry of Norfolk fret over the ‘damp-course’ and bleeding the radiators, unspoken social mores and petty social interactions.

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The stories are subtly composed and elegantly written. The narrative voice is attractively wry, and particularly acute in its choice of telling detail. Its air of savouring diffidence, moreover, is curiously reminiscent of Anthony Powell, particularly in our sense that behaviour is being observed far more than judged. No one should be deterred by the Norfolk setting, for only in the most literal sense is this provincial fiction. After Stewkey Blues, I for one would happily read Taylor about anywhere: Swaffham and Snoring (Little or Great), to be sure, but also Timbuktu.