The Bricks that Built the Houses: : Kae Tempest: Bloomsbury Paperbacks

The Bricks that Built the Houses

Description

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Award-winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest's electrifying debut novel takes us into the beating heart of the capital in this multi-generational tale of drugs, desire and belonging.

It gets into your bones. You don't even realise it, until you're driving through it, watching all the things you've always known and leaving them behind.

Young Londoners Becky, Harry and Leon are leaving town in a fourth-hand Ford Cortina with a suitcase full of money. They are running from jealous boyfriends, dead-end jobs, violent maniacs and disgruntled drug dealers, in the hope of escaping the restless tedium of life in south-east London – the place they have always called home.

As the story moves back in time, to before they had to leave, we see them torn between confidence and self-loathing, between loneliness and desire, between desperate ambition and the terrifying prospect of getting nothing done.

In The Bricks that Built The Houses Kate Tempest explores contemporary city life with a powerful moral microscope, giving us irresistible stories of hidden lives, and showing us how the best intentions don't always lead to the right decisions

Product details

Published	09 Mar 2017
Format	Paperback
Edition	1st
Extent	416
ISBN	9781408857335
Imprint	Bloomsbury Paperbacks
Dimensions	198 x 129 mm
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Kae Tempest

Kae Tempest is a poet. They are also a writer, a l…

Wonderful

Lauren Laverne
Soaring … Tempest's flair for language is tempered by her sense of rhythm and pace … Deeply affecting: cinematic in scope; touching in its empathic humanity … Tempest's voice – by turns raging and tender – never falters

New York Times
This is a bold, bright, beguiling novel; a lustrous pageant that dazzles and grips … An irresistible, immersive snapshot of a changing world, delivered in woozy, staccato sentences … There's great pleasure to be taken from Tempest's debut … She may well be unstoppable

Sunday Telegraph
One of the leading wordsmiths of our time … She turns her raw, observational skills in book form to the urban young growing up poor – sex, drugs and increasing poverty amid the looming threat of gentrification

Jon Snow
It's hard not to be blown away by Kate Tempest … A stirring, post-Dickensian lens trained on London's lonely underbelly

Evening Standard
This book is almost everything I hoped it would be. That is praise indeed, as I had high hopes ... As lyrical as it is gritty, and as devoted to (south-east) London as it is to humanity, with all its foibles

New Statesman