Book review: Fallout by Lesley Parr

We continue our reviews of books shortlisted for this year’s Wales Book of the Year award.

Fallout is one of 12 English language books shortlisted for the 2025 Wales Book of the Year.

You can vote for this year’s People’s Choice Award here. 

Jon Gower

Sometimes your very name can be a curse and that’s certainly true in the case of Marcus Pritchard, whose family is held to be the dodgiest and most disreputable in the village.

His brother Carl is in borstal, while his dad, uncle and nasty brother Gavin are planning to rob a factory. And to add to his general woes Marcus has just caused an explosion in the science lab, confirming, as if any confirmation was necessary that being a Pritchard, or being anywhere near a Pritchard is simply bad news.

Fallout is set in the 1980s, so Marcus wears a Harrington jacket and listens to the Jam, that is if Gavin hasn’t borrowed it and scratched the vinyl all to hell. There’s lots of solid period detail, from Malted Milk biscuits and Ford Capris to slices of Battenburg cake and Tiswas on TV.

Lonely

Marcus has fallen out with his best friend Jezza and his parents are consistently mean to him, so Marcus is isolated and lonely. That is, until he slowly befriends Emma, a CND protestor, and at the same time gets to know an intriguing old man called Mick. He has his own reputation in the village, described as not being like anyone else:

“He never goes down the pub with the other old blokes, and he’s always busy but no one knows what he does. Some people call him a loner, others call him a nutcase. Jezza likes to frighten the little kids by saying Mick catches local cats and stews them to make cawl, but I know that one’s a lie.

“There’s a cat in the house next door to him and she’s perfectly healthy.”

Nuclear bunker

The former soldier is a resourceful old fellow and being so busy and good with his hands means he has managed to manufacture his own nuclear bunker at the bottom of the garden, capacious and sufficiently well stocked for Mick to survive a nuclear winter.

For as the novel’s title reminds us, this is the time of anxiety about nuclear armaments, not dissimilar to our own, given recent US actions in bombing nuclear sites in Iran. The 1980s was a time of Cold War, CND and slogans such as “Give Peace a Chance.”

Mick doesn’t trust the government to look after the people, citing the public information leaflets that suggest how folk should ‘Protect and Survive’ which advise using “an old door and a few bin bags” for that protection, while the politicians head for the bunkers.

Life decisions

The central trio at the heart of the book is superbly well drawn, with Marcus acting as the hinge-pin, a young man facing a welter of important life decisions, some of which might help shrug off his reputation for trouble. As the book’s tagline has it: ‘A bad start. A good friend. A tough choice.’

When the peace protestors’ float at the local carnival blows up as the result of sabotage, with Mick being hospitalised as a consequence, it turns Marcus and his new friend Emma into detectives and successful ones at that, leading to the discovery that the culprit is someone very well known to them.

This is ultimately a book about redemption, with much of that deriving from friendship, although it also touches on themes such as revenge.

When brother Gavin gets his long-deserved come-uppance there will be very few readers who disagree with the suggestions that he had it coming to him or that it was very richly deserved. Gavin is a nasty piece of work, which means Marcus has a nemesis right in the heart of the family.

Quality

Lesley Parr is an author who has already won the Wales Children’s Book of the Year two years ago with Where the River Takes Us.

The fact that Fallout, her fourth children’s book is shortlisted for this year’s prize underlines her quality as a writer, fully evident in the flowing pace and gentle grip of her characters on the reader.

Because you’d have to be pretty stone-hearted not to warm to Marcus, and take his side in the many life battles he is fighting, and to see that he is basically a good kid, just one from a very bad family who almost managed to snuff out that goodness and break the boy’s very defiant spirit.

Fallout by Lesley Parr is published by Bloomsbury. It is available to buy from any good bookshops.