Bumping

Nominated for the 2010 Portico Prize for FictionBumping, set on contemporary Tyneside, interweaves three stories. Each presents a character whose obsessions and attachments become magnified through chance encounters, leading to unforeseen and ultimately catastrophic results. The ''bumping'' of the title conveys something of these random processes, as well as one character''s passion for recreational lock-picking. The stories are told in a number of voices: middle-aged way leave officer Frank; teenagers Nicky and Barry; and the heart-breakingly confused and ever-optimistic elderly Tom. The novel''s themes include relationships with home and place, male preoccupation with mechanisms and systems, moral evasion, and the tyranny of random events. Bumping is about obsession and longing on contemporary Tyneside. It is also a novel about youth and old age, delusion, lock picking and Californian ladybirds."Edgy, occasionally funny, sometimes dark... reveals [an] amazing eye for detail... [the sections on teenagers] Barry and Nicky and [senile old man] Tom, are classics."The Morning StarTony Bianchi was born and grew up in North Shields, on Tyneside. Formerly Literature Director at the Arts Council of Wales, he is now a freelance writer, translator and arts consultant and lives in Cardiff. He has won prizes for his Welsh-language fiction, including the Daniel Owen Memorial Prize and nominations for the Welsh Book of the Year.