Friction

Transports the dystopian sexuality of Michel Houellebecq to the throbbing bars of Manchester, where a gaggle of characters numb their morality in pursuit of the ultimate orgasm. Satirically imagining a bleakly banal world of rampant consumerism and pregnancy as the final, putrid fetish, Friction snarls, spits and crackles like an anti Sex and the City or Kafka with cum-shots

ID magazine

Joe Stretch is such an original writer it's pointless to compare him to anyone, yet his black humour, sardonic tone and sheer readability suggest that Anthony Burgess is alive and well and still living in Manchester. This is A Clockwork Orange for the 21st century

Nicholas Royle

A sharp and intense world created by a radical new writer

Xiaolu Guo

Clever, savvy, licentious and macabrely funny with it

Manchester Evening News

Like Houellebecq for generation WHY

Ewan Morrison

Raw, wild, aflame with ideas, Friction will bring a cure-or-kill medicinal shock to our post-boom hangover

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Joe Stretch takes no prisoners with this debut, presenting a distorted reflection of 21st century Britain that's as black as it is bracing... Friction succeeds as a highly charged vision of modern society's moral decline - it's a novel that may well achieve the cult status it's striving for

Metro

Friction is a bellow of rage and disgust at the eagerness with which the 21st century soul attenuates itself. That this trivia-obsessed, pornography-fraught and digitised-to-death world that we have made for ourselves can produce such high art, and with such slicing satirical humour, is one of the central paradoxes, and causes for celebration, of our age

Niall Griffiths

A caustic comedy, and doesn't mark the arrival of a new provocateur but of a promising satirist

Independent on Sunday

Vicious, funny and disturbingly honest, Friction is a fine debut from an assured new writer

New Statesman