A young man has dreams of buying a house at the top of a "bad" part of Bristol, rapidly being gentrified, where he has just committed a murder, and ostensibly, just seen one the following day-- causing events, and his dreams, to spiral beyond his control.

Scenes digress into his past as he encounters members of the neighborhood, contextualizing as he moves through areas. It's great at this aspect of the story. With the premise and the arc being interesting. I also think the dialogue is particularly strong. Unfortunately, the rest of the writing style in this is too grating for me to contend with, though. If I hadn't picked this up under the context of reading Booker-eligible nominations, maybe I'd have had lower expectations too. The flow is really awkward and, worse, vaciliates often. This is also accentuated by how the paragraphs are formatted. Not enough attention is given to really quite pivotal moments, yet digresses into granular specifics for the innocuous. Smilies are really incongruent with what is occurring on the page but likened to cultural aspects of the protagonist and community. I can see why this is happening yet it takes me out of the fiction a lot of the time when compounded with the other issues. I also just did not see where this was going with the faith angle right up until the point of DNF, around 25%. That's a long time to have bible quotes and talk of pastors and lead up to, presumably, the main inciting incident (which could have been three or four other events but aren't because they're all but eschewed).

In short: it reads very well for a debut novel from a young person. It is not, I think, particularly well written for a literary book being considered against others for a prize. But I see many people really like it, so it may just be down to something as simple as taste pertaining to writing styles. I'd place it as an upmarket release--not quite literary, certainly not commercial fiction. It's got a lot of votes for Booker-eligible hopefuls, though.