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The Bricks that Built the Houses
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Description
The highly anticipated debut novel from Kae Tempest--acclaimed poet, playwright, rapper, and recording artist--proves their talent to be boundless and unstoppable.
Becky, Harry, and Leon are leaving London in a fourth-hand Ford with a suitcase full of stolen money, in a mess of tangled loyalties and impulses. But can they truly leave the city that's in their bones?
Kae Tempest's novel reaches back through time--through tensely quiet dining rooms and crassly loud clubs--to the first time Becky and Harry meet. It sprawls through their lives and those they touch--of their families and friends and faces on the street--revealing intimacies and the moments that make them. And it captures the contemporary struggle of urban life, of young people seeking jobs or juggling jobs, harboring ambitions and making compromises.
The Bricks that Built the Houses is an unexpected love story. It's about being young, but being part of something old. It's about how we become ourselves, and how we effect our futures. Rich in character and restless in perspective, driven by ethics and empathy, it asks--and seeks to answer--how best to live with and love one another.
Kae Tempest, a major talent in the poetry and music worlds, sits poised to become a major novelist as well.
Product details
| Published | 03 May 2016 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 416 |
| ISBN | 9781620409022 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Wonderful
Lauren Laverne
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Soaring … Tempest's flair for language is tempered by [their] 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
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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 … [They] may well be unstoppable
Sunday Telegraph
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One of the leading wordsmiths of our time … [They] turn [their] 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
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It's hard not to be blown away by Tempest … A stirring, post-Dickensian lens trained on London's lonely underbelly
Evening Standard
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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

























