‘Apples’ is told mostly in the alternating girl and boy perspectives of Eve and Adam. Eve is a dolled-up blonde beauty with salivating boys at her feet at every turn. She fancies her booze, drugs and the gang of girls she pals around with. Boys are mostly a bit of bother – always trying to stick their cocks in her and little else. Eve’s mom is dying of cancer. Her older sister is getting married. Her father is shacked up with a new woman. Eve and her friends do their best to find their way without slutting around too, too much. In the end, what she really craves is a boy who will care for her after he’s cum – which seems like a simple, noble thing to covet.

Adam is an obsessive-compulsive, awkward boy who eventually grows a bit of backbone over the course of the novel. An early tragic-comedic scene has Adam wanking to his father’s porn rags. Adam also wallows alone; listening to old Beatles records, afraid to venture outside his bedroom. Terrorized by his brutish dad and intimidated by the beguiling Eve, it takes a beating at the hands of a neighbourhood thug after a school dance to help illuminate Adam’s path. He chums around with a girl named Abi. She’s a hottie but he turns her down when she brazenly offers up her jewels; it’s Eve he craves, Eve he must have.

Milward writes in an infectious slippy-trippy style that blends northern English slang with contemporary international vernacular. He captures female and male points of view equally well. As ‘Apples’ rolls along, Adam and Even slowly come together – but not completely, not fully. It looks for a while – particularly following a bleak scene when Eve wakes at a house party in a friend’s bed feeling violated that the two will remain mismatched. You get the idea that Adam’s adoration of Eve – like so many teenaged lust crushes – will go nowhere. Milward dances around the fringes well, keeping the tension and anticipation high, rather than forcing resolution down the reader’s throat.

Milward also infuses enough dire reality into the novel, in the form of many flavours of violence (e.g., child abuse, sexual predation, drunken beatings, etc.) to make certain the reader knows that Adam and Eve’s budding romance is set against a backdrop of squalid English council flat living. This makes the novel plausible and gives it a degree of social criticism, intended or not. Milward shows readers desperate teens cut adrift in a booze and drug haze, willing to fuck at the drop of a hat, and then text their mates to relay the underwhelming details. But the humour, rhythm and fine pace of Milward’s storytelling prevent the novel from ever becoming maudlin. Remember that grin; I swear to you it was there almost the entire time I read this excellent first book from a fiery young English writer.