Cinzano, furs, and the lost glamour of seventies Leeds clubland

A disillusioned, drug-soaked intellectual is escaping ‘The Heat’ – both literal and metaphorical – by relocating to a new town in the North. What follows is a surreal immersion into the region’s club culture, where fevered dancing, shadowy relationships, and the rituals of nightlife blur the boundaries between reality and delirium. Employment as a croupier leads to encounters with a cast of eccentric figures, none more vivid than Christine – a ‘Superstar Croupier’ whose fierce individuality, joy and pain mark her as the radiant centre of the novel.

Set in Leeds during the height of the Northern Soul explosion in the seventies, There’s No ‘F’ in Wonderful is at once hilariously funny and deeply unsettling, exploring the magical yet disorienting passage between adolescence and adulthood – a time when anything seems possible, even as the world insists otherwise.

Broady has long written for those who remain irrepressibly young in heart and spirit. With There’s No ‘F’ in Wonderful, he delivers a strange, glorious celebration of resilience, joy, and defiant living. Or as the book itself insists: Live! Live! Live!

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For Yorkshire novelist Bill Broady, the nightclubs and casinos of 1970s northern England were more than places to drink, dance and disappear for the weekend. They were theatres of longing, ritual and escape – memories that now echo through his latest novel, There’s No ‘F’ In Wonderful.