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"A fascinating family and social history and a savage indictment of the role of child slavery in the growth of the Industrial Revolution," Catherine Taylor, author of The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time We all think we know the tale. As a child, Charles Dickens was forced to work in a mouldering Thames-side blacking factory, an event that scarred him for life and inspired Oliver Twist. Except that's only part of the story. In reality, Dickens appropriated the stories of foundlings and orphans - including Robert Blincoe, whose memoir supplied the source material for his great novel of childhood. In Oliver Twist & Me, novelist Nicholas Blincoe presents a dual biography of Dickens and his ...
Almost as soon as 'club culture' took hold - during the UK's Second Summer of Love in 1988 - its sociopolitical impact became clear, with journalists, filmmakers and authors all keen to use this cultural context as source material for their texts. This book uses that electronic music subculture as a route into an analysis of these principally literary representations of a music culture: why such secondary artefacts appear and what function they serve. The book conceives of a new literary genre to accommodate these stories born of the dancefloor - 'dancefloor-driven literature'. Using interviews with Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting (1994), alongside other dancefloor-driven authors Nicho...
Second edition of this guide for students studying contemporary British writing - written by one of the key academics in the field of modern fiction studies.
David and Tony are old friends who go back a long way. And like old friends they help each other out when the circumstances require it - the odd shifting of four tons of marijuana across a war-torn zone here, and the dodging of the FBI's "most wanted" list there. Tony was even best man at David's wedding, though the nuptials didn't exactly go to plan on account of encroaching police prescence forcing David to do a flit half way down the aisle... Now, fifteen years later, David's flying to the Holy land to help Tony out with a property deal. All he has to do is sign on the dotted line and act as the legitimate middle man in a highly unlegitimate transaction. Then he can enjoy a holiday with unlimited spending cash. But following a case of mistaken identity, some Russian drug czars, the interests of the Israeli Secret Service, a Lite FM DJ, some chicken farmers, some hit men, and a very persuasive singing nun, he finds himself embroiled in a caper that is going to turn out to be anything but a holiday.
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When James Beddoes, a former financial journalist, moves to Paris, it is ostensibly to write a novel based on the diaries of Paul-Antoine Brunel, a French lieutenant who became a leader of the Paris Commune during the Siege of Paris in 1870. But James is also in Paris to pursue a Frenchwoman, Flavie, whom he met at a party and with whom he has become infatuated. Although it soon becomes clear that Flavie is gay, James nonetheless becomes drawn into her volatile emotional relationships, all the while secretly hoping that he can change her mind. And in parallel, amid the political struggles and the battles of the Paris Siege, another love story is unfolding - between Brunel and Babette, a married restaurateur. But when James follows Flavie to Palestine, and as the Paris Siege intensifies, all four protagonists are brought face to face with the brutal reality of civil war.