Peterdown

“Real-time historians of the neoliberal scorched earth, we walk the line, our collective dreams in tatters but our eyes wide open all the time.”

David Annand’s Peterdown is a novel of dilapidated football grounds and post-industrial community, tired modernist forms and ramblers’ elegies to everyday miracles; of infidelity, folk culture, resistance and homespun art projects. Within it, an architect and her daughter bond by gathering curios at car boot sales and charity shops to fit out their Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblages, a route recreated by the author with friend, Martin Poyner. The pair raked through transit vans, fly tips, attics and second-hand stores together for resonant objects that build on the book’s concerns. Out of them, Poyner has improvised a series of assemblages caught in a complex web of authorship, spanning the deceased Cornell, a fictional architect and her daughter; Annand, and Poyner himself.