419 pages
English language
Published July 9, 2003 by Vintage Contemporaries.
This is an enjoyable read of Britain (specifically Birmingham) in the 1970s through teenagers' eyes. From first love, strikes, riots, racism, class, terrorism, affairs, and music we get to relive those terrible times. It's probably a five-star book, but the last chapter... jeez, it's like 50 pages of stream of consciousness, one single run-on sentence, and it is hard work.
A very enjoyable book. I'm about five years younger that the main characters, which was close enough in a lot of ways to give the story a nostalgic character. The characters are all well-developed; both complex and growing (it is as, after all, a coming-of-age novel) and the lot is interesting with unexpected twists and turns. I see that a lot of reviews were not enamoured with the final single-sentance chapter. I actually quite liked it, it conveyed a sort of breathless recounting in quite a special way. I read this book in preparation for reading his Middle England novel, so am definitely looking forward to seeing what he has done with those characters all these years later.
