It doesn’t seem quite right doing a literary mixtape for a book that I loved so much. Because I should be telling you why I loved it, and urging you to read it. Read this review and also this one – they sum up why it’s ace. Now off you go and read it.

5/5 Magnificent.

Gimme Some Truth / John Lennon

Oh the truth was raw, as raw as you could get, unrehearsed words from a brand new throat.

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No More I Love Yous / Annie Lennox

If we lived in a world where good deeds meant anything I’d have played along but this isn’t that kind of world.

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Honesty / Billy Joel

He rested his forehead against hers. “Everything’s wrong, Karine. If I can feel it then why can’t they see it?”

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A Little Time / The Beautiful South

That he was being driven to drink by a taciturn child was as good a reason as being defective in spirit and in genetics, but the counsellors preferred internal triggers and vague spiritual shortcomings to logical grounds for needing the poison. In one of last week’s sessions he’d explained it: the cruelty of his progeny was what had left him in this shitheap.

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To Build a Home / The Cinematic Orchestra

He yearned for all of it: the crusts on the worktop, the empty toilet roll tubes, the plates under beds…The triumphant complaints from Kelly on yet another infringement of her teenage right to languor. A mound of socks tumbled onto the kitchen table for Ronan and Niamh to match into pairs…He couldn’t think of home as a space that demanded his reconstruction. There was nothing wrong with it.

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I Wanna Life / Goldfrapp

He could build a customer base whose appetite for smoke, coke and yokes was matched only by their inability to keep their wallets shut; he could live on his own and trick sales assistants into giving him naggins of whiskey; he could strip his girlfriend gently and fuck her hard but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out how to move his triggers so his father wouldn’t know how to yank them.

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Things Go Wrong / Chris Isaak

I live on my own and one day a man broke into my flat. I crept up behind him and hit him in the head with a religious ornament. So first I suppose God would have to forgive me for killing one of his creatures and then he’d have to forgive me for defiling one of his keepsakes.

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All I Really Want / Alanis Morissette

When Maureen figured out that not only was she pregnant, but pregnant and abandoned by a coward, it was both horrifying and vaguely freeing, like hitting bedrock. She considered her options: the stairs, the coat hanger, the boiling baths. It didn’t take her long to reject them. There was something to be said for fulfilling the destiny her mother had kept harping on about.

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So Cold in Ireland / The Cranberries

January was a cunt at the best of times, pissing ice down upon a crowd damp to their bones. Sudden room in the shops after the Christmas eruption, cold space in the pubs and the cheer sucked back out and up the chimney. This January reeked of vengeance.

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Pain and Misery / The Teskey Brothers

What he wanted, Ryan Cusack, was Karine D’Arcy, all of her: body, soul and intent. That denied to him, he tried revenge, and the more he pushed it the harder it punished him.

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Our Love (Don’t Throw it All Away) / Andy Gibb

The frame around which one build’s one life is a brittle thing, and in a city of souls connected one snapped beam can threaten the spikes and shadows of the skyline.

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As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (June 28): Belfast 10°-19° and Melbourne 5°-13°.