It became an Australian bestseller, and is often credited with launching the short-lived Grunge Lit or Dirty realism movement – terminology that McGahan himself (along with most of the writers to whom it was applied) rejected.
Dirty War | Dirty Jobs | The Dirty Dozen | Literary realism | Dirty Dancing | Dirty Harry | Dirty Rotten Scoundrels | Dirty Pair | Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (film) | Dirty Three | Dirty Sexy Money | Dirty Projectors | Dirty Old Town | Socialist realism | Play Dirty | Dirty Penny | Dirty Dozen Brass Band | Angels with Dirty Faces | Ol' Dirty Bastard | magic realism | Let's Get Dirty (I Can't Get in da Club) | Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (musical) | Dirty Mind | A Low Down Dirty Shame | Thugs with Dirty Mugs | The Dirty Sock Funtime Band | The Dirty Picture | Speculative Realism | Seven dirty words | Magic realism |
Although heralded as part of the first wave of the Australian Grunge Lit movement, Liadhen is in fact a dreamlike and non-realistic story set in a fictional town in the Australian Alps, and incorporating few of the traits of urban-based dirty realism that characterised that movement.
“Debut novelist Alan Simpson’s semi-autobiographical tale of life as a porn-store clerk The Mop (PL70.net HARDBACK, OUT NOW), is great, sleazy fun and may even be the birth of hip-hop dirty realism.” Q magazine, issue 317, Recommender column