Rare Singles

A warm, tender and funny story about unlikely friendships, second chances, and the magic of soul music
'A book of rare charm by a writer who understands the magic of music' Ian Rankin 'An entertaining tale of grit, fecklessness and Northern Soul' Daily Telegraph 'The book you didn't know you need' Bobby Palmer 'A tale of soul music and second chances' Guardian 'The laureate of friendship, a chronicler of unexpected, transformative connection' Wendy Erskine 'A meditation on grief, love, and the redemptive power of music' Observer
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Dinah has always lived in Scarborough. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, her one release comes at her town's Northern Soul nights, where she gets to lose herself in the classics.
Over in Chicago, Bucky Bronco has been down on his luck since the loss of his beloved Maybellene. The best he can hope for is to make ends meet, and try and stay high. But then an invitation arrives, from someone he's never met, to come to somewhere he's never heard of. In need of the cash, Bucky boards a plane.
And so he finds himself in rainy Scarborough, where everyone seems to know who he is - preparing to play for an audience for the first time in nearly half a century...
Wise, hilarious and profound, Rare Singles is an unforgettable story about the power of music and friendship to bring us back to ourselves.

Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. He is the author of ten books, including The Offing, which was an international bestseller and selected for the Radio 2 Book Club; The Gallows Pole, which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction and was adapted for a BBC series by Shane Meadows with A24; Beastings which was awarded the Portico Prize for Literature, and Pig Iron which won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize. He has also published non-fiction, poetry and crime novels and his journalism has appeared in publications including the Guardian, New Statesman, TLS, Caught by the River and many more. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.
benjaminmyerswriter.com / @BenMyers1