From the publisher:
'Poignant and tender' - Ferdia Lennon
'A dynamic voice' - Irenosen Okojie
'Lushly written and formally audacious . . . moving' - Nicolas Padamsee
This is the story of one man's weekend, a weekend in which everything could change.
These lines could change everything /He sips more of his tinny /Imagines a new life.
Aidy's just punched a co-worker, but he hasn't got time to deal with the fallout. With a deadline fast looming he must get home, knuckle down and finish the story he's been working on, a story he hasn't been able to stop thinking about. It's the story of a falling plane and of a grieving mother.
Set across one weekend, About to Fall Apart is the exhilarating story of a man of mixed heritage - living on the Irish border - as he tries to stay positive, reconnect with his children and maybe, even, find his own birth mother.
The author:
Ashley Hickson-Lovence is the author of the novels The 392, Your Show, and Wild East. Your Show, a fictional biography published by Faber in 2022, was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards. It offers a poetic and distinctive reimagining of the life of the Premier League’s first Black referee, Uriah Rennie. Wild East was the overall winner of the East Anglian Book Awards 2024 and the YA winner of the Diverse Book Awards 2025. His poetry collection Why I Am Not a Bus Driver, published in 2025, includes the poem “Munster Road,” which was highly commended for Best Single Poem by the Forward Prize. He holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia and was nominated for the Black Excellence Award for Outstanding Contribution to Literature in 2023. His new novel, About to Fall Apart, will be published by Faber in April 2026. The title comes from a voicemail left by footballer Emiliano Sala shortly before his death, and the novel explores the emotional and ethical aftermath of that tragedy.
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