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The Dead Don't Bleed
  • Published: 21 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9781787335363
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $34.99

The Dead Don't Bleed

Formats & editions
Hardback
21 Apr 2026
EBook
8 Jan 2026
Audiobook
8 Jan 2026
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From the doomed coalfields of north-east England to sun-bleached southern Spain, two brothers confront each other and themselves to overcome their family legacy

Set against elemental landscapes – the dying coalfields of Northumberland and the barren wastelands of Andalusia – The Dead Don’t Bleed is an unflinching exploration of fraternal rivalry, family trauma and the lasting effects of a violent patriarchy.

Frank Bridge turned his back on his family’s gangland conflicts in Northumberland decades ago. His brother, Gordon, fled to Spain with the proceeds of a disastrously botched robbery and has not been heard from since. Frank’s life has taken a different path: he fell in love, studied Lorca and is now writing a book.

But when their gangster father, the head of their savage dynasty, dies, Frank feels he must track Gordon down and tell him that their father’s reign of terror is over. Can Frank’s appearance after twenty-five years prompt a truce, a reconciliation even, or will his arrival merely be the catalyst for more turmoil and brutality?

Taut, elegiac, violent and beautiful, Neil Rollinson’s debut novel is about how family can make or break us. Beneath the scorching, pitiless Andalusian sun, the two brothers are finally brought together for one last reckoning.
  • Published: 21 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9781787335363
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $34.99
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About the author

Neil Rollinson

Neil Rollinson is the author of four poetry collections: A Spillage of Mercury (1996), Spanish Fly (2001), Demolition (2007) and Talking Dead (2015). He won the National Poetry Competition in 1997, received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2005, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Prize for Talking Dead. The Dead Don't Bleed is his debut novel, and won the Deborah Rogers Award for previously unpublished prose writers in 2023.

NR

Also by Neil Rollinson

Talking Dead
Demolition
Spanish Fly
See all

Praise for The Dead Don't Bleed

Marrying the violence, duende and scouring light of Lorca's Andalusia to the broken bottles and police sirens of 1970s Newcastle, this compelling, beautifully written story of male heartbreak slyly explores the way poetry helps you survive your past

Ruth Padel

Throw Sexy Beast and Get Carter in a blender, add some Lorcanian duende from blasted blood-drenched Spain and some of that soul-sadness from the sodden, post-industrial far north of England, and you'll get something like this gripping, compelling, elegiac and dismayed novel. Savage, sorrowful, superb

Niall Griffiths

This dangerous delight is what happens when one of Britain’s best poets marries Lorca’s landscapes and 1970s gangland Newcastle in fiction — a thrilling, deep-song, high-proof novel that’s brilliantly imagined, gorgeously crafted and several cuts above the usual debut

Sarah Hall

The Dead Don’t Bleed is vivid, lyrical and propulsive. Each scene feels charged: a current of violence crackles throughout. Every sentence, every word, is in its rightful place

Malachy Tallack