About to Fall Apart

Ashley Hickson-Lovence

Faber, 2026

It’s out / the soundtrack of the summer / announced by the sirens / projected / through the lips of Ashley Hickson-Lovence’s narrator / soaked in Guinness / garage / rhyme

The novel beats with the quick, forward-slash verse form, narrating the chaotic weekend of a nearly seventy-year-old father of teenagers. The multiple parts of protagonist Aidy’s life coalesce like scheming groups in The Tempest, his house of cards threatening to collapse at any moment.

The deadline of a short story competition looms. His children and their mothers arrive seemingly out of nowhere. His search for the identity of his own mother narrows. The subject of his short story, the late Emiliano Sala, approaches his tragic death. The tune of Irish garage single ‘Up De Flats’ by Gemma Dunleavy accompanies the constant thrum of uncertainty.

The lack of sentence breaks throughout makes for an innovative, verse twist on free indirect discourse. The rhythm is breathless, constantly building the tension to the roaring climax at a bar in Enniskillen.

We learn about Aidy’s forgetfulness, his shortcomings as a father. He is engrossed in the challenge of meeting his deadline until ‘he sees there’s someone pulling into his drive / a flash-looking thing / & it dawns on him who it is & why they’re here / how could he get it wrong? / how could he forget? / he was sure he saw something different in his calendar / his designated weekend with his daughter’.

Despite his absences, we empathise with Aidy. We sympathise with his upbringing as a mixed-race foster child in conservative Ireland. We long for Eimear and Osh to pick up on his good intentions, so when the verse might otherwise border on the saccharine, it hits the spot instead, like sweet strawberries in a heatwave.

Aidy ‘twerks & whines / jiggles & jives / it’s been ages since he felt this alive / […] Aidy downs the rest of his pint / they wiggle & twist / twirl & spin / everyone is clapping’. The reader need not have been to Charlie’s Bar to understand perfectly the moment, the expressiveness of the language so perfectly in tune with its subject’s earnestness.

There is a threat underlying these celebrations, too. That this moment the novel has been building towards could all come crashing down. The possibility of collapse – of being about to fall apart, like the characters in his short story – hangs over the reader such that these scenes of momentary ecstasy become just as keenly felt by us as they are by Aidy.

As with Sala’s story, there are also quieter moments. The forward-slash verse form gives the narration some of the self-declarative characteristics of spoken-word, which lands off-key at times with the prosaic parts of the plot. As Aidy works, we see a writer wrestling with his internal critic – ‘piecing it all together / & now it’s just a case of getting it down / adding more & more words / despite how cringe they seem / he knows he can’t edit words that aren’t there to begin with / he’s trying to stay positive’. The ponderous, closed nature of the writing process flattens the verse when set against the tuneful hum of the wider novel.

Hickson-Lovence’s style, however, is unquestionably a revelation in the way he is able to create magic out of the mundane. The pace of narration mingles with rhyme and contemporary signifiers to transform commonplace objects of modern life into vital parts of the epic: ‘only had a few, was on the Lucky Saints mainly / lucky saint indeed / a soundless beat’. Of the song that Aidy drives to, it ‘has become the soundtrack of the weekend / & when the song slows to its end / Aidy instinctively starts it from the beginning again’. The written words come to sound like they are part of the song itself, read to a classic garage beat and ringing round the reader’s head.

None of this is to say that Aidy’s weekend is some vision of perfection. He is deeply flawed, estranged, questionably redeemable. But he is brilliantly well-observed. The arc of his life mirrors the plane, his mother and the imagined mother of Emiliano Sala. Both women separated from their sons, uncertain whether they are alive or dead. Each story building, hopeful, vulnerable, human.

Hickson-Lovence’s verse form gives order and joy to the mess of life. To read About To Fall Apart is to read with headphones on, nodding one’s head. Finish it in one. Listen to ‘Up De Flats’, go back and read the lyrics. Let this book be the ‘soundtrack of the summer’.

Faber & Faber: About to Fall Apart

Magnus McDowall

Magnus McDowall is a poet from London and a postgraduate student on the Creative Writing MSt at the University of Oxford.