Human Punk

By: John King

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Paperback | 14 January 2016

At a Glance

Paperback
368 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.3 x 13.9 x 2.5

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A rare novel set against a punk-rock background that works as a cultural document-punk and politics: a way of life. A film based on the novel is in currently in development.

For 15-year-old Joe Martin, growing up on the outskirts of West London, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, busy pubs, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cutthroat Teddy Boys, and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet-until he is attacked by a gang of youths and thrown into the Grand Union Canal with his best friend Smiles. Fast forward to 1988, and Joe is traveling home on the Trans-Siberian Express after three years away, remembering the highs and lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with tragedy. Fast forward to 2000, and life is sweet once more. Joe is earning a living selling records and fight tickets, playing his favorite 45s as a punk DJ, but when a face from the past steps out of the mist he is forced to relive that night in 1977 and deal with the fallout. Human Punk is the story of punk, a story of friendship, and a story of common bonds and a shared culture-sticking the boot in, sticking together. This edition includes a new introduction from the author.

Industry Reviews

"In its ambition and exuberance, Human Punk is a league ahead of much contemporary English fiction."
--New Statesman

"The long sentences and paragraphs build up cumulatively, with the sequences describing an end-of-term punch-up and the final canal visit just two virtuoso examples. These passages come close to matching the coiled energy of Hubert Selby's prose, one of King's keynote influences... In the resolution of the novel's central, devastating act, there is an almost Shakespearean sense of a brief restoration of balance after the necessary bloodletting."
--Gareth Evans, The Independent

"King's eye for detail is as sharp as his characters' tongues, and his creations are eminently three-dimensional: insightful and funny one minute, bigoted and fucked up the next. Like real people, then."
--The Face

"Unique and brutal fiction. King is a master of idiom and street slang. He appears with a voice that appears to be the true expression of disaffected white British youth."
--The Times

"A novel dedicated to good literature lovers. Rough, violent, scary, visionary, true, political, raw, aggressive, totally moving, this novel has got the anger of the Sex Pistols, the energy of the Clash and the pumping lines of the best dub courtesy of King Tubby."
--Pop Culture Detox

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