For some the city is their birthplace and home, but for most of us, it is somewhere arrived at after years of hard work and perseverance and it becomes our home, gradually, in the place of far calmer, more serene and frankly altogether less entertaining origins.
Birchfield Close recalls these places of apparent mundanity. Endless horizons of prefabricated suburban houses with carefully tended back gardens and trimmed hedgerows; each abode with it's own minute manifestation of individuality yet still somehow identical to the next. This is a world that many of us know and think of as home, and as many of us will attest to, is a place most unsuited to being an adolescent.
In his first graphic novella, Jon McNaught provides us with a sympathetic portrayal of what most of us ended up doing on those sleepy days: allowing the idiosyncrasies of our neighbours and our imaginations to entertain and amuse us and stave off the boredom. What makes this book so special, however, is that whilst capturing the frustration one can't help but feel in such surroundings, McNaught somehow also manages to capture its beauty and peacefulness and transport us back to those clear evenings dotted with pink fluffy clouds and the sound of that silence we have come to yearn for after so many years of living in the centre of the bustle of the city.
Jon McNaught graduated from the University of the West of England in 2007 with a degree in illustration.
He now lives in Bristol where he works as a printmaker and freelance illustrator, and contributes comic strips to various publications.
