1 Thursdays

Newcastle, London, America. You can go anywhere, it's still the same old shit. People just getting by, in any way they know how. But I tell you what they don't have, they don't have a £1 Thursday! 17-year-old Jen and Stacey are best friends. Since forever. Stacey always dreamed of being a dancer. And she's actually got the talent for it. Only her school career advisor hasn't even been to London, let alone heard of Urdang. Jen is smart. Like Oxbridge smart. But all 'smart' gives her is the ability to see that there's no use trying to change the story prewritten for her, growing up in an underfunded and forgotten Bradford in the 2010s. They only have one place they can escape to... Club Ocean on a Thursday night. Freedom for Jen and Stacey. A beautiful and hilarious coming-of-age story, Kat Rose-Martin's £1 Thursdays captures and celebrates the trials and tribulations of what it means to be young, Northern and working class, when for one Vodka-blurred second, you're allowed to forget everything and just dance. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at London's Finborough Theatre in November 2023.

Thursdays with Leila exemplifies the slapdash style and narrative verve, piety and subversion, timeless myth and topicality that made Corín Tellado the queen of the Spanish romance. Of a later generation than Britain’s Barbara Cartland or France’s Delly, she, like them, nevertheless wrote in a society tensed between the inexorable development of modernity and a deep-rooted social conservatism.

The author – Denny J.A. – in this work of literature succeeds at interweaving the play of politics (the state) and the individual, alongside the impact of trauma and loss, and creates a collective memory of a difficult and painful time in Indonesia’s history.