Books
The Dig Street Festival
John Torrington is not OK. It’s 2006, Leytonstow is crumbling, his job is unpleasant, his friends are weird, and he’s in love with a gothic barmaid whose boyfriend is a City banker.
Meanwhile — actually, in 1911 — a doomed, though resolutely chipper, expedition stumbles across the white wastes of Antarctica.
Misfortunes seldom come alone — and in Leytonstow, they arrive thick and fast. Glyn, John’s gloomy housemate, is haunted by night-time visitations from famous Germans (and infamous Austrians); Gabby, their sweet-natured companion, is quietly informed by the Jobcentre that the world no longer has a place for him.
John decides enough is enough. Quite naturally, he sets out to stage the greatest (and first) love revolution this part of Northeast London has ever seen — just as their shrewd landlord, Mr Kapoor, unveils his ruthless gentrification plans for Clements Markham House.
The Dig Street Festival is a surreal, comic tragedy about failure, friendship, guilt, and the cracked places between who we are, what we imagine, and what we can’t. And somewhere within those cracks — or failing that, at the South Pole — something might just thrive...
Originally published by Louise Walters Books in 2021, and now reissued by the author in 2025, this new edition includes a preface by Chris Walsh reflecting on the long road to writing the novel, and why he’s chosen to bring it back to life.
Book of Jobs
Most of us don’t choose a career; we take jobs to keep the wolf from the door. Unbidden, in fluorescent rooms, cold-morning warehouses, care homes, classrooms, and sweaty offices, we learn what the world is really like — and what we’re really like. Among much else — and much too late — we emerge with a crystal-clear sense of what we definitely don’t want to do when we grow up.
Book of Jobs follows the author across three decades and more than twenty-five roles, from school cleaner to care assistant, warehouse picker to teacher, office temp to corporate cog, and back again. It is a memoir of class, survival, breakdown, accidental beauty, and the stubborn need to create, even when creation doesn’t pay — a portrait of working life in all its absurdity, exhaustion, and unexpected grace.
The Blue Babies
The Blue Babies
This novella follows one man who feels like he belongs neither on Earth nor in Heaven. Reeling from a breakup, drifting through early-2000s London, he stumbles through absurd encounters, lust, failure, Van Gogh’s severed ear, and the quiet horror of becoming an adult.
The Blue Babies are the souls that didn’t make it. The ones who almost were. They vastly outnumber the living, and, curated by Paul McCartney, they watch.
Deeply absurd and rooted in the everyday, The Blue Babies is about the pain of being born, the shame of being ridiculous, and the impossible task of living meaningfully with a brain you never asked for.
Originally written in 2004 and published with only light edits, it’s an unpolished, strange artefact from a writer learning how to write—and how to survive. A dry run, of sorts, for Chris Walsh’s first published novel, The Dig Street Festival.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, ridiculous, quietly thrilled—or definitely doomed—this might be for you.