![]() 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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