The Bricks That Built the Houses by Kate Tempest review – daring and vivid

Kate Tempest’s debut novel offers a fresh vision of familiar lowlife, but her prose is sometimes a little too dazzling for the page

At 30, Kate Tempest is less than seven years younger than me and yet the distance between us feels like decades. Early on in her debut novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, Tempest’s heroine, Becky Darke, 26, is standing next to a fellow dancer, Aisha, at a music industry party. “Aisha is rich with confidence,” we’re told. “The brutal unnerving confidence of a 21-year-old… Becky is surprised that Aisha has stopped so long to hang out with her. She makes Becky feel old.”

This is rather how Tempest’s novel worked on me, leaving me with the sense that any criticisms I might level at a book that is often strikingly original but under-edited and uneven, would only be reflected back at me, evidence of my desperate uncoolness and early-onset middle age.

Continue reading...