A young men's club devoted to standing on high parapets; a gambler who gets tips from his late wife; a boy hunting the streets of a strange town for his unknown father. These are among the matters at the heart of the worlds through which Alan Franks's exhilarating new novellas move. Linked by the traffic of lives between the north and the south of England through the pre-war years of the twentieth century to the present day, they sweep across a broad social canvas which veers between the dark and the dazzling. It takes in the haughty gibberish of a faded Oxford don, the hopes and despairs of a bypassed ship town and the survival of a lone house in the wreckage of Manchester. Against the backdrop of the 1992 general election, we meet the self-conscious Old Etonian Fabian and his love rival, the radical Bill Haycraft; on the eve of the millennium we encounter the sinister and ambitious Methodist Fazackerley; then, in a time just beyond the reach of our present one, we come face to face with the legacies of our own and the nation's past. The repercussions run like a bursting river into every domain from the private to the political, the marital to the musical. We have even found an ancestor piecing together the road to the Peterloo Massacre as its two hundredth anniversary draws near. The protests and betrayals of the Sixties are sounding quaint from here.
- ISBN13 9781999662387
- Publish Date 27 August 2018
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint i2i Publishing
- Format Paperback
- Pages 280
- Language English