Description
Book SynopsisWhat you've got to understand is that here in Southall, everyone's up to something.In 2006, Lilian Pizzichini swaps life on dry land for a narrowboat on the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal. The
Adam Bonny, moored between Newlocks and Shackleton Estates, is to be the place she can learn more about her extensive working-class London family and the place where she will become pulled into a strange underbelly of drugs, vagrant neighbours and criminals.Lilian always found it easier to observe than join in. Abandoned by everyone around her, by the time she was fourteen she had developed a taste for Pernod and black. Speed allowed her to talk to boys, but she spent most of her time with her great-aunt Dolly, who had no regard for convention, sang songs and urinated on the street. Born into the slums of Lisson Grove, Dolly spoke like Eliza Doolittle when no-one was listening. With her, Lilian felt the bonds of mischief, gambling, madness and song.As the sad lives of her
Trade ReviewWildly original and imaginative and disturbing, it remains in one's consciousness like a very vivid dream. The evocation of place is brilliant and also of sensation *
Francis Wyndham *
Praise for
Dead Men's Wages: This memoir is as good as a novel *
The Times *
In telling the story of her criminal grandfather ... Pizzichini paints a dark-hued portrait of London, the scabbed, peeling city that shaped his anti-social tendencies *
Daily Telegraph *
Praise for
The Blue Hour: A wonderful book: exciting and dramatic as narrative, perceptive and original as literary criticism *
Francis Wyndham *
This engrossing account of Jean Rhys's painful life is as near as we are likely to get to how Jean saw it herself *
Diana Melly *
