AFTERNOON DRINKING

‘The stuff of people’s lives is conveyed in these stories with precision, care and compassion. There’s such richness in their documentation. Resolutely unsentimental but attuned to tenderness and poignancy, Alan Beard is the real deal.’

Wendy Erskine

In his first major collection since 2011's You Don't Have To Say, Birmingham-based Alan Beard returns with Afternoon Drinking.

Through Alan's richly textured prose, you will find unique insights on the often tender, frequently dysfunctional, hard won and hard lost paths of love, obsession, regret, longing and all the other flavours of human frailty.

A man slips loose his moorings and ends up imprisoned in his flat.

Two parties years apart are linked by one man’s obsession for a woman who doesn’t see him.

A woman plots revenge on her imaginary son’s bully...

Alan Beard’s long awaited third collection of stories finds him at the top of his game.

Told with unflinching honesty and compassion, Afternoon Drinking firmly establishes Beard as one of England’s finest short story writers.

Released November 6th.

Pre-order now and receive your copy as soon as stock is available!

'He has the world now, the world has just walked in... Busy, brash and often boisterous about the people who 'look wrongly put together', Beard's stories take you right inside those sidelined lives trying to make sense of the world and their place within it and just before the world walks away again. From lost loves to pretend lives and those we inexplicably get mixed up in, these stories take you into Birmingham's darkest corners on your hands and knees by the scruff of your neck and return you to your own world all the better for spending time with those trying to matter too.’

Lisa Blower Winner of the 2025 VS Pritchett Short Story Prize, The Guardian’s National Short Story Prize and the 2020 Arnold Bennett Prize. 

‘Alan Beard writes with a candour and emotional truth that almost hurts to take in, awakening our humanity and attentiveness in a way that much fiction fails to. Exhilaratingly well crafted – every sentence a precision bomb defusal, the urgent sense that if we can just cut the right wire and describe it exactly right it won’t go off and take us all with it. The voices, whether damaged, resilient, cynical or thwarted, sing off the page. Occasionally it struck me that if these works were set somewhere else they’d be translated and internationally celebrated, but we can’t quite bring ourselves to care or really pay attention to people in our own country – and actually a sense of that psychological and spiritual neglect is part of what informs these stories. There are plenty of places we can go for half-truths, for sentimental or exaggerated versions of England. If you want the genuine magic, dedication and acute, gimlet-eyed perception of real literature, read Alan Beard.’

Luke Kennard Winner of the Eric Gregory Award 2005

‘Like Denis Johnson, Beard takes you down—down into a world of drugs, alcohol and despair, where people teeter on the edge of spiritual or literal death. His pared down prose reads, at times, like poetry. There are little moments of beauty, transcendence; they shine like shards of mirror. Sometimes the voice feels like an incantation, a rant. There’s humour, too.’

Amanda Smyth Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize 2022 and winner of the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger 2010.

‘I was completely absorbed by all the stories from first to last. Utterly interesting, utterly consistent too. The empathy for people, the feel for language and the telling details of daily life and failure, pleasure too. The compressed poetic line, the supple movement within sentences. I will need at least another read to describe the full effect of these startling stories.’

Alan Mahar, writer and publisher

‘The unsentimental but affecting way Beard writes about ordinary people (in Taking Doreen Out of the Sky) makes him irresistible.’

Nicholas Royle, writer and publisher