Blog tour: Street Sweeper by Bren Gosling

This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘London, 2002. When Almir, a 21-year-old Kosovan ex-boy soldier, is relocated to London with a new identity, flashbacks undermine his ability to keep his job as a street sweeper.

‘Then he meets Roland, a 40-year-old British Jamaican, a council surveyor trying to escape his Pentecostal upbringing and a failed relationship with Shirl, with whom he has a fifteen-year-old son.

‘Roland and Almir become closer as Roland offers first friendship, then sex, yet Almir remains secretive about his past, and struggles to identify as gay, forcing Roland to question their relationship. And who is Muzzafer, the name Almir repeatedly shouts out during frequent nightmares?

‘As tension builds, Almir confronts his involvement in a war atrocity, which threatens to destabilise his sanity and his new UK life. But, against all these powerful obstacles, Almir and Roland’s love for each other continues to grow. Is it strong enough to last?’

In Street Sweeper, by Bren Gosling, three lonely strangers navigating major life changes find one another, and tentative hope for the future, in early twenty-first century east London.

Young Kosovan Almir has not long been resettled in the UK with a new identity as part of a witness protection programme. He’s traumatised by his harrowing experiences in the Kosovo War, which sometimes makes it difficult to function, let alone connect with other people and carry out his duties as a street cleaner. He spends much of his free time either alone in his bedsit or at the internet café where his friend Elyes, an “illegal” from Algeria, works.

Middle-aged Roland – whose mother came to Britain from Jamaica as part of the Windrush generation – has just moved to his own flat in Walthamstow, having finally come out as gay following his religious mother’s death and left the home he shared with his ex-partner Shirl and their teenage son, Gary. He meets Almir by chance and the pair fall into a romantic relationship, but Almir remains quite an enigma with his extreme trauma responses and refusal to tell Roland his story.

Fifty-four-year-old Julie, meanwhile, is trying to find meaningful ways to fill her time as a recent divorcée and empty-nester. As part of this, she becomes a volunteer befriender for refugees and asylum seekers, and she’s matched up with Almir. It’s awkward at first, but she’s not easily deterred, and the two of them progress to an unlikely but genuine friendship, with Julie eventually meeting Roland and his friend Stan, too. She also comes to question what she really wants in terms of relationships at this stage in her life.

I found Sweet Sweeper a enjoyable and ultimately uplifting book. The clear, crisp prose makes it a relatively quick, easy read, but that doesn’t mean it’s “light”: all the characters feel well filled-out and complex, and the worst part of Almir’s war experience, when he’s ready to recount it in full, makes for a necessarily shocking and emotionally heavy chapter.

The relationships that develop between the three very different main characters are touching without feeling overly-wholesome or saccharine. Roland and Almir’s budding romance is often “three steps forward and two steps back”, as Roland is navigating a new world as a gay dad to an unpredictable, spiky teenager, and Almir is understandably easily spooked. Julie’s first visit to Almir is excruciating, but they stick with it.

Gosling has done a great job situating the novel in its place and time. Almir’s peripatetic outdoor job and trauma-induced hypervigilance means he quickly becomes familiar with his new local area and notices things others might overlook, rendering the physical setting especially vivid and authentic.

The author rises to a real challenge by setting a book in the early 2000s, a period that isn’t as immediately identifiable from its news, music, or fashion as some. He does well to make as much as he does out of some pretty desultory cultural material (the Golden Jubilee celebrations are a particular anchor I’d more or less completely forgotten about!). It’s more the way the characters are less committed to their basic phones, and have to go to fixed locations such as the internet café to get online that really gives the novel its 2002ish flavour (and makes me realise in horror that it was actually quite a long time ago now!).

Something else I appreciated was that Street Sweeper doesn’t have a neat “and they all lived happily ever after” ending: all the characters are happier and more fulfilled than they were at the start, but realistically, their lives beyond the story could still unfold in any number of ways. I also liked how being paired-up wasn’t the “happy for now” ending for all the characters, with Julie’s new platonic relationships framed as being just as good an outcome as Roland and Almir’s romantic one.

Street Sweeper is a realistic and touching story of unexpected connections.