'Manchester Kiss incorporates alongside the narrative an unusual amount of thematically-linked correspondence and verse. Unusually, too, it has no central hero or character as such.

'The neighbourhood in which the action takes place is the main character, if you like — and Manchester Kiss is a novel about that neighbourhood inasmuch as the people who live and work there are all interrelated in time and space, and everything that happens to them or through them quite clearly affects the lives of their friends, associates, and compatriots.

'Uniting them too is a common theme that concerns itself with the ways in which these same people either reject or succumb to the various individual treacheries that are practised upon them by the powers-that-be or by the people and things they hold most dear.’

Bill Keeth