At various points John and his friends find themselves accidentally robbing a bank, attending a pen-training seminar in order to fill out a council form, and re-exploring the south pole at “Leytonstow’s premier ice skating venue”.
The novel has a sweetly funny tone arising both from its main characters’ warm naivety and the absolute chaos of the plot. The borough itself has a starring role in the story and readers can enjoy picking out the cameos from “Whitehorse Road”, “Leytonstow Village” and of course “Dig Street” itself (I may be a little slow, but it did take me a while to connect this to Hoe Street). Both marginal and marginalised, Gabby, John and Glyn are all residents of the rapidly deteriorating Clements Markham House, the kind of much-divided, over-crowded crumbling villa that will be familiar to any resident of Waltham Forest. The trio of characters at the centre of Chris Walsh’s debut The Dig Street Festival are among the unlikeliest I have ever met in a novel. Sarah Fairbairn reviews a novel set in the familiar-sounding neighbourhood of Leytonstow
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