‘Pleasure Beach does for neon lycra cycling shorts, Nik Naks, and acid trips what Ulysses did for lemon soap: it kaleidoscopes the everyday in a way that remakes the world by recording the bits of it that all too often slip out of view of the literary. 1999 is right before your eyes reading this novel, and Helen Palmer is Blackpool’s incomparable archivist. A social history of fun’s commodification and excess, an intellectual ride, a real queer pleasure. ’ – H. Gareth Gavin

‘A book as mind-bending as the town itself.’ – Jeremy Deller

‘Strap in for a heady rollercoaster ride where stream of consciousness, littered with song lyrics, fuses and fractures into a play script and concrete poetry to create a new language. Immediate. Visceral. Anarchic. Enticing. The magical mundane spirals into sensory overload until you feel you’ve actually spent a weekend at Blackpool sea front. With echoes of Kathy Acker and Ann Quinn, Helen Palmer has the voice of a free spirited writer unafraid to speak their truth.’ – Patrick Jones

‘In Pleasure Beach twenty-four hours becomes a feminist epic, a compulsive and convulsive kind of ecstasy that makes myth of Blackpool and young women. The “we” of the novel feels like a chorus – an “us” – hurtling through the same day and night as Olga, Rachel and Treesa, where time warps and extends around the momentum of falling in love. Walking a tightrope between the metaphor and the real, Palmer writes against humans as symbolic figures, collapsing together the internal and the external so that there is a kind of unreal-real rawness throughout. The intimacy of Pleasure Beach raves through the text, critiquing patriarchy and capitalism with a structure and style that upends and overturns, a tumult of fixation and energy. The novel is electrifying while redefining what the electric could be.’ – Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain

‘Pleasure Beach is the alcopop-soaked, stylistically promiscuous Y2K queer seaside teenage experimental novel you never knew you needed – with its chorus of voices ranging from Jacques Lacan to the Vengaboys and an impossibly sweet central romance, it is funny, sexy, class-conscious and, as they used to say, intensely intense.’ – Owen Hatherley