DarkWinter Press New Release: Peeling Apples by Alan Parry

DarkWinter Press is thrilled to announce our latest release, the debut novella Peeling Apples by Alan Parry, available now on Amazon in paperback and e-version for Kindle! You can buy it here!

About Peeling Apples:

Martyn is ten years old, navigating a world of routines and quiet mysteries. His days unfold between school, his Nana Mavis’s small, familiar house, and the blurred presence of his overworked parents. But it’s the house next door that draws his attention, the one with the overgrown garden, the untidy porch, and Mrs. Joyce, a woman who seems set apart from everything and everyone.

At first, she is an oddity, a distant neighbour glimpsed through gaps in the fence. But when an accident leads to an unexpected encounter, Martyn is pulled into her world of cacti in teacups, peeling apples in perfect spirals, and slow, thoughtful conversations that stretch beyond what he understands. In her quiet company, he finds a space unlike any other, a friendship that grows in the silences between them.

Yet, the things adults don’t say begin to press in: unspoken worries, absences that lengthen, a door that one day remains closed. In the face of change he cannot control, Martyn must learn what it means to hold onto something even as it slips away.

Peeling Apples is a meditation on childhood, loss, and the quiet imprints people leave on each other’s lives. Lyrical and intimate, it captures the bittersweet moment when a boy begins to understand the weight and inevitability of love.

Advance Praise for Peeling Apples:

"Reading this I almost felt like an intruder. Alan Parry’s novella is a vignette, a journey in a personal time machine, transporting the adult reader back to a world bombarded with the everyday sensations which is childhood, which is growing up. A process of learning about the world and our lives. Here we enter the interior world of a sensitive little boy, the observations acutely childlike: brightly coloured yet black and white, sharp yet soft, sweet yet bitter. If you have read much of Alan’s writing you might find this surprising – heartwarming is not a word that springs to mind when you look at some of his poetry– but I defy you to be cynical about this cameo of a young boy’s life. Sweet in parts, maybe. Saccharine, never. And moving, definitely." Mary Earnshaw, Three Winter Tales of Darkness and Light

"Peeling Apples is a deeply evocative coming-of-age story, rich with memory and longing. The quiet weight of childhood is something we all feel; through the eyes of Martyn, a boy navigating the uncertain spaces between youth and understanding, we are drawn into just that. A lost world of backyard football games and cracked pavements, and the silent struggles of adults around him. Parry's prose is lyrical and stark, and Peeling Apples paints a vivid portrait of working-class life where the compelling warmth of Nana’s kitchen co-exists with the quiet melancholy of a community bruised by time.

With each tenderly observed moment - peeling apples at a worn kitchen table, the thud of a football against a painted wall - Parry's discerning narrative within this curious, affecting novella unearths the beauty and the mundane in our 'everyday'. Martyn's unlikely bond with his mysterious neighbour, Mrs. Joyce, demonstrates the subtle ways in which love and grief intertwine. It's a one-sitting read - as stirring and bittersweet as the scent of baking scones, and as haunting and poignant as the memories we carry with us."

Paul Robert Mullen, it’s all come down to this: a retrospective

About The Author:

Alan Parry is, above all else, a poet. His work is a meditation on death, passing time, grief, masculinity, and nostalgia—an ongoing documentation of his lived experience. Rooted in both lyric and narrative traditions, his poetry blends modernist sensibilities with neo-imagist precision, often slipping into the surreal while remaining tethered to cultural reference points and astute observation.

His debut collection, Neon Ghosts (2020), explored worlds just out of reach—an America we thought we knew, relationships lost to time, and the ghosts of the past. Belisama (2021), a collaborative project with David Walshe, Paul Robert Mullen, and Mary Earnshaw, was a prize-winning collection that captured the essence of Southport, the northern town they all call home. Echoes (2022) was his most intensely personal work, an autobiographical collection of poetic letters and a monologue play that blurred the boundaries between poetry and theatre.

With Twenty Seven (2023), Alan turned his eye to Jim Morrison, crafting a poetic tribute that both celebrated and interrogated the counterculture icon, weaving together Morrison’s stylings with his own voice. Tenets (2024), a sprawling deconstruction of hegemonic masculinity, exists both as a page poem and a forthcoming recorded work set to music in collaboration with Matt Guntrip.

Alan’s first major prose work, Peeling Apples, marks a turning point in his career—a literary novella that he considers his most accomplished piece of writing to date, both structurally and thematically.

Beyond his own work, Alan is the driving force behind The Broken Spine, an independent press committed to publishing challenging, exciting poetry. His Slimline anthologies are a bold, twelve-part project designed to position the press as an important voice on the fringes of the mainstream. As an editor, he embraces all styles, reading widely and publishing work on its own terms rather than through the lens of personal preference. His openness to influence shapes his own craft—not in a derivative way, but as a poet who remains porous to the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary poetry.

To understand Alan Parry’s artistic journey is to trace it chronologically—beginning with Neon Ghosts, through each collection, and now to Peeling Apples—witnessing the refinement of a voice that questions, challenges, and constantly evolves.