Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

But & Though

By: Jake Hawkey
Narrated by: Jake Hawkey
Pre-order: Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pre-order Now for £8.99

Pre-order Now for £8.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

In But & Though, Jake Hawkey scrutinizes the impact of parental addiction on families, its title a nod to the language of dependency, its circles of prevarication and excuse. Hawkey’s poems chart the loss of a father and the resilient love between siblings, and take an unflinching look at a parent–child relationship sometimes painfully inverted through alcoholism.

Hawkey’s fresh perspective and playful style introduces a vital, authentic new voice in British poetry. It will appeal also to those interested in the wider literature of addiction and the complexities of urban working-class life in Britain. Hawkey approaches these subjects from highly original and personal angles, breathing life into his characters and settings. Ultimately, we come to know a young writer attempting to ‘detach with love’ as he strides forward into his own life.

©2025 Jake Hawkey (P)2025 Macmillan Publishers International Limited
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Critic reviews

Here is a wonderful new voice, full of a spiky energy accompanied by a wild imagination. His language bristles with a sense of its own freshness. His working-class world is alive and quivering. A brilliant collection. (Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me)

"A requiem to fathers, to the streets, to the estates; at times a smash in the face with a skateboard, laughing and ‘chattin breeze’. Hawkey unravels the raw truth behind grief, alcohol dependency, and family traumas, ultimately finding ‘God dwells in every man’." (Roy McFarlane, author of The Healing Next Time)

"Hawkey writes with serious ambition: these poems are daring in their formal organisation and their political intellect. There is also a real humour here, an ironic, knowing sensibility that never gets in the way of the poems' emotional contents. Hawkey tackles difficult subjects - alcohol dependency, deprivation, and intergenerational trauma - with admirable lucidity, attuned to both their tragedy and comedy (Padraig Regan, author of the Forward Prize-shortlisted Some Integrity)

What listeners say about But & Though

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.