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The Dead Don't Bleed
  • Published: 8 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529963380
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $38.00

The Dead Don't Bleed

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8 Jan 2026
Audiobook
8 Jan 2026
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Two brothers reckon with violence, legacy, and redemption, from the doomed coalfields of northern England to the beaches of Spain

A gritty and vivid interrogation of one family's empire of violence

Frank Bridge turned his back on his family's gangland conflicts in Northumberland decades ago. He fell in love, went to university, and is now writing a book on the Spanish poet Lorca. When his father, the violent patriarch, dies, he decides to face the past and returns to Spain to carry out his research, and perhaps reconcile with his erstwhile brother Gordon, who lives on absconded gang money in a villa on the Costas.

However, whilst Frank has been changed by twenty five years apart, Gordon still holds on to the rage and terror of a life of crime. From the doomed coalfields of northeast England to the beaches of Spain, the two brothers fight with each other, and themselves, to overcome their family’s legacy.
  • Published: 8 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529963380
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $38.00
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About the author

Neil Rollinson

Neil Rollinson is the author of four poetry collections: A Spillage of Mercury (1996), Spanish Fly (2001), Demolition (2007) and Talking Dead (2015). He won the National Poetry Competition in 1997, received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2005, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize for Talking Dead. The Dead Don't Bleed is his debut novel, and won the Deborah Rogers Award for previously unpublished prose writers in 2023.

NR

Also by Neil Rollinson

Talking Dead
Demolition
Spanish Fly
See all

Praise for The Dead Don't Bleed

Marrying the violence, duende and scouring light of Lorca's Andalusia to the broken bottles and police sirens of 1970s Newcastle, this compelling, beautifully written story of male heartbreak slyly explores the way poetry helps you survive your past

Ruth Padel

Throw Sexy Beast and Get Carter in a blender, add some Lorcanian duende from blasted blood-drenched Spain and some of that soul-sadness from sodden, post-industrial far north of England, and you'll get something like this gripping, compelling, elegiac and dismayed novel. Savage, sorrowful, superb

Niall Griffiths

This dangerous delight is what happens when one of Britain’s best poets marries Lorca’s landscapes and 1970s gangland Newcastle in fiction — a thrilling, deep-song, high-proof novel that’s brilliantly imagined, gorgeously crafted and several cuts above the usual debut

Sarah Hall