Rare Singles is a slim novel focusing on Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco, a seventy-something Black man living in Illinois, who cut a few soul records as a teenager but has spent much of the recent of his life working dead-end jobs and devoting his life to his wife Maybellene, who has recently died. Out of the blue, he receives a request to travel to Scarborough, a fading seaside resort in Northern England, to play a comeback show at a Northern Soul Weekender. Unbeknownst to Bucky, who was paid a derisory flat fee for his initial recordings so has no way of tracking their afterlives, his two ‘rare singles’ have become loved and treasured in the Northern Soul scene, which gave another life to many obscure releases from US soul singers on the Northern-English dancefloors (and to some extent, the UK charts) of the 70s and beyond.

Cuddy begins with the death of its eponymous hero, St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, in 687, and thereafter takes us on a wild and eclectic ride through the centuries, giving us an alternative history of the North-East of England , over which the venerated saint’s influence looms large. Casting an equally grand shadow over the novel is Durham Cathedral, Cuddy’s burial place. The novel is split into four sections and an interlude, the first of which (‘Saint Cuddy’, taking place in 995) follows a band of monks as they carry the saint’s corpse around the North for decades (his body having been evacuated from the island of Lindisfarne in order to protect it from desecration by invading Danes).