RICHARD MILWARD’S no-holds-barred debut is the story of a boy named Adam and a girl named Eve. They live in Middlesbrough, in the sort of run-down housing estate familiar to armchair class-travellers everywhere as places where truancy, drugs and underage sex have brought nothing but pain and misery (according to Newsnight) or raucous, filthy fun (as in Shameless).

Appropriately, Eve is first to taste forbidden fruit, and lo, she finds it as toothsome as the first Cheeky Vimto of the evening. When we meet her there isn’t a pill she hasn’t popped or a Breezer she hasn’t thrown up, and this makes her a tricky proposition for Adam, who worships her from afar but is, by his own estimation, a “total knob” – never been drunk, never been with a girl, can’t dance, and, after a traumatic encounter with his father’s Razzle, possessed of a healthy disgust for female genitalia.

Eve sweeps up the mess in his head “like a maid with a feather duster”.

She lives in a world where Sunday mornings come with a question mark over whether you had sex the night before and who with. Milward does not stint on details of just what life is like for the pathetic teenage temptresses of the real Little Britain. Parents are abusive, absent or ill. Babies are resented and, in one particularly horrible scene, simply disposed of. The only joy is in the nonverbal abandon of clubbing, in those precious minutes between coming up on your “Versace” [a type of Ecstasy] and starting to feel sick.

Alongside chapters told by Adam and Eve are esoteric interludes where the narrator is a butterfly or an unborn baby, and each time Milward acquits himself brilliantly.

At one point, Eve’s pal Dyslexic Debbie tells her tale. She is a budding graffiti artist who idolises “CYN ni detniap ohw sepyt yoB-B eht”, and she explains, in her head-spinning way, that: “.efil ni erehwyna teg ot gniog saw I fi evitaerc eb ot dah I wenk I aixelsyd eht tuoba tuo dnuof I nehW.”

Apples is an electrifying book, as frightening as it is funny, full of words that will have you running to urbandictionary.com, before cunningly using them in your own everyday speech. But don’t be fooled by the kid-friendly cover: Milward’s Middlesbrough is child’s play only in the nastiest possible sense.

APPLES by Richard Milward

Faber, £9.99; 208pp £9.49 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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