A love letter to the lyrics of Levi Stubbs’ Tears by Billy Bragg

With the money from her accident she bought herself a mobile home.

That is not your average opening line. Most pop songs don’t get all in your face from the get-go, certainly not with a masterpiece of compact, single-sentence story telling such as this.

Billy Bragg dispenses with the pleasantries in favour of a narrative gauntlet. He throws down the most heavily loaded of lyrics.

It is a complete and self-contained twelve word story, but it begs so many questions about possible pasts and possible futures and possible protagonists. You could rewind from here, or fast forward. You could pull out or zoom in.

You want to do all of these things.

‘My jobs are to make you care about the characters and to make you want to know what happens next,’ says Lionel Shriver about the essence of fiction writing. The author of We Need To Talk About Kevin is speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Bragg has done both jobs in one line.