An industrial accident in a wire factory and the chance discovery of a birth certificate. Church services held in a ruined swimming pool. An unidentified elephant skull.
Midland tells the stories of three young women as they fight to find their feet amidst the accumulated rubble of the twentieth century. From the bombsites of the 1940s to the construction sites of the 1960s and the school halls and decaying tower blocks of the 1980s, Honor Gavin has created an ingenious narrative of one Midlands family that is also a startling, anarchic history of a city.
Composed in electric prose that soars and dives, blending keenly observed dialect with urban theory, cinema, farcical digressions and surrealist timekeeping, Midland is a novel out of time but in the middle of everything.

H. Gareth Gavin was born in Birmingham in 1984. His fiction has appeared in journals such as Hotel and Short Fiction, and he also publishes work that moves between the creative and the critical. His short story, 'Home Death', was longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, and Midland: A Novel Out of Time (Penned in the Margins, 2014) was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Never Was was published by Cipher Press in 2023. He currently lives in Manchester, where he works in the Centre for New Writing and also teaches a course on trans theory.