Tragedy severs five friends from their past in a subtly radical novel set in a working-class area of Birmingham
Keiran Goddard is a poet and novelist whose debut novel, Hourglass, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize in 2022. His second novel, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, is a worthy successor. A multivocal narrative focusing on a working-class community in Birmingham, it follows Rian, Patrick, Shiv, Oli and Conor as they grow up and grow apart. Rian has left Birmingham and got rich, more or less by accident, playing the stock market on his laptop; the other four stayed behind. As Goddard observes in a striking opening sentence, “And then none of it happened.” Life came at them fast, and none of their dreams has come true. Patrick works as a takeaway delivery biker, and has two children with Shiv; Oli is a drug dealer too fond of his own supply; Conor has a chaotic home life, and a plan to make things better.
At the beginning of the novel, these childhood friends get together for a night out, and Conor asks Rian if he can borrow money to embark on a construction project. By the end of the book, they’ve gone through a tragedy that seems to have cut them off definitively from their past.
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