Workington Man

He drove the bus. Still, he was not the Workington Man. Yakob leaves medical studies in Addis Ababa and arrives in Britain with no clear map for the life ahead. London offers music, desire and false starts; Reading gives him a daughter; Workington gives him work, friendship and a blue double-decker bus that becomes as much an outsider as he is. For three decades, Yakob learns the town from the driver’s seat: who needs extra time at the door, where the rainwater gathers, which passengers are lonely, and which men hide tenderness behind jokes. Yet the people closest to him know the cost of the choices he avoids. Then Britain discovers the phrase “Workington Man” — white, angry, left behind — and Yakob realises that the town he has served for years cannot quite see him. As old love, family wounds and unfinished loyalties return, he must decide whether leaving is another flight or, at last, a choice. Warm and unsentimental, Workington Man is a novel about migration, work, fatherhood, lost love and the courage to begin again.