Search results for ""Author Bill Broady""

This is for anyone who sweated their way through the summer of '76, as well as readers of Jonathan's Coe's The Rotters' Club, Martin Amis's Success and Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. It's the long, hot summer of 1976 and Adrea is falling in love for the first time, while nursing the decrepit residents of Heron Close, a care home in Chalk Farm. This is the summer that sees Blue Oyster Cult and Supertramp superseded by Patti Smith and the Stranglers, and as the heat rises in and out of the Roundhouse, the lives of Heron Close's residents and carers alike are about to blister and burn. And right in the midst of all this humdrum squalor, like the sun's rays beating back the darkness, are Adrea and Evan, about to let in the light and heat - with inflammatory results.

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Broady's major work of fiction, nearly a decade in the writing, explores the origins and development of the Independent Labour Party the working-class political movement founded in Bradford in 1893. Detailing the exploits, fortunes, and relationships of three central characters: passionate Fred Jowett, ruthless Philip Snowden (later, the Labour Party's first chancellor), and the licentious and unforgettable Victor Grayson.Spanning four decades, the novel covers the socialist foment and activism of fin-de-siècle Britain, the impact of the First World War and the changing landscape of the interwar years, as social change points forward to a new politics and the reinvention of Britain, despite fierce resistance from the establishment and its allies. And all punctuated with sex, comrades, hustings, art, dialect and copious points of order.With cameos of every leading socialist of the age, this sweeping generational tale is thrilling, revolutionary, ribald and laugh-out-loud funny.

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