Celebrations: Alan Burns

Celebrations, Alan Burns’s third novel, brings the inherent violence and oppression so apparent in Europe after the Rain into the setting of a family-owned factory, where social hierarchies, legal structures and humiliation keep the workers in line.

By bringing the differences between workers sharply into focus, Burns creates a choking atmosphere of oppression and exploitation – heightened and upended by his trademark aleatoric style, peppering with seemingly random headlines and offcuts the text, which has not lost any of either its relevance or its acerbic bite in the intervening years.