Helen Palmer’s debut novel Pleasure Beach is Prototype’s latest addition to their consistently unique and boundary-pushing library, and has certainly earned its place there. Palmer crafts an altogether fantastic queer love story from a single day on the Blackpool seafront circa 1999: an impressive feat, an ambitious homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses and an exemplar of what literary modernism is all about.

On this theme of modernism, it is then fitting that the moment in time which Palmer has captured in late-90s northwestern England. Arguably an apex of the era of alternative culture and music, the three 19-year-old women who we hear from across Pleasure Beach are simultaneously symbols of raw human joy and pain, as well as real individuals going about a somewhat ordinary day of their lives.

The chosen structure, which reads as a hybrid of poetry and prose, accentuates the themes and imagery that Palmer has captured. From Olga, whose future as a playwright lies somewhere vague beyond the end of her shift at the chip shop, to Treesa the ex-gymnast en route to Sandcastle Waterpark… and then McDonald’s on the way home. In many ways, it reflects not only the conflicted state of mind of the characters but the sea-like ebbs and flows of life; its successes and failures.