It is the first day of term at a secondary school on Merseyside, 2001. The Towers are soon to fall. A boy cowers in an alleyway, surrounded by a group clad in black. They whip his bare legs with nettles. This is only the start.

As term unfolds, their bullying campaign intensifies. Soon the boy finds solace hiding in marshland under the nearby motorway. Voices there urge council with Grannies Rock, a strange stone that sits on derelict land known as The Breck. There, the whispers in the breeze promise a terrible revenge.

Twenty years later, the boy has grown. He is back home from London to pack away his childhood. Armed with a Polaroid camera, he aims to exorcise those painful memories through a series of photographs. But is his memory of what happened reliable?

Nettles is a powerful exploration of memory and violence, excavating the stories we tell ourselves to escape our past.

Praise for Adam Scovell and Nettles

'Scovell’s psychogeographic interests are to the fore as his protagonist returns to the places — a motorway flyover, a disused quarry — that once offered both literal and psychological sanctuary, and that flavoured the fantastical hinterlands of his adolescent mind.'
– Daily Mail

‘Nettles succeeds in capturing the very essence of the Wirral, its strangeness… Adam Scovell delves into his own memories, but touches on something deeper, more universal. In doing so he gives us a hint, a brief glimpse, of that which lies beneath the primordial soil of the place he calls home.’
– Psychogeographic Review

‘Adam Scovell captures the suburban ennui, past and present, with precision as he does the narrator’s connection with the natural world which clings on in the edge-lands and marshland butting up against the motorway and housing estates.’
– The Crack

‘To be stung by Nettles is to know you have lived the life of Adam Scovell’s The Boy, for we are all that child in an oversized uniform, we have all found hidden corners near our home, within the school gates, in which to hide from the nature of the oppressor. A beautifully detailed tale, one of heartbreak and reassurance.’
– Liverpool Sound and Vision

‘Buried in Nettles is a bitter family story that stings the narrator far worse than the bully from his school days. It’s fascinating to watch Scovell expertly play the bullying story and the family saga against each other, until one strand emerges holding the narrator’s past at gunpoint.’
– Vertigo

‘Scovell doesn’t aspire to realism: instead he invests his talents in hallucinatory imagery, haunting atmospherics and prose that again blends the stately melancholia of WG Sebald with the logorrhoea of Thomas Bernhard.’
– Guardian, on How Pale the Winter Has Made Us

‘A story of grief told through the meticulous mapping of a city… methodical and restrained, yet deeply evocative.’
– Starburst, on How Pale the Winter Has Made Us

‘A fine portrait of grief – and the strange roads it can lead us down.’
– TLS, on How Pale the Winter Has Made Us

About the author

Adam Scovell is a writer from Merseyside now based in London. He completed his PhD in Music at Goldsmiths in 2018. He has written for the BFI, Literary Hub, Financial Times, Little White Lies, and the BBC as well as many other outlets. He is the author of Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Auteur, 2017), Mothlight (Influx Press, 2019), and How Pale the Winter Has Made Us (Influx Press, 2020).

Paperback ISBN: 9781910312735

Ebook ISBN: 9781910312742

Publication date: April 2022

Formats: Paperback / eBook