Benji is an imaginative eight-year-old boy, living with his parents in a mining village in Nottinghamshire amidst the spoil heaps and chip shops that characterise the last industrially bruised outposts of the Midlands, just before Northern England begins. His family are the eccentric neighbours on a street where all the houses are set on a tilt, slowly subsiding into the excavated space below. Told through Benji's voice and a colourful variety of others over a deeply joyful and strange twelve-month period, it's a story about growing up, the oddness beneath the everyday, what we once believed the future would be, and those times in life when anything seems possible.

1983 is steeped in the distinctive character of a setting far weirder than it might at first appear: from robots living next door, and a school caretaker who is not all he seems, to missing memories and the aliens Benji is certain are trying to abduct him.