Product details
- ISBN 9781844089826
- Weight: 107g
- Dimensions: 171 x 200mm
- Publication Date: 01 Aug 2013
- Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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WINNER OF THE JOHN LLEWELLYN RHYS MEMORIAL PRIZE
'Her art is ignited by voice, as you hear it, is unquestionable' ALI SMITH, GUARDIAN
'Distinctive, pared-down style' DAVID EVANS, INDEPENDENT
'Unflinching look at the lives of working-class women' DAILY MAIL
Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy.
In this novel, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry.
Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful and timeless testimonial to it.
Nell Dunn (1936) is an English playwright, screenwriter and author. She was educated at a convent which she left at the age of fourteen.
She shot to fame with Poor Cow (1967) and Up the Junction (1963), both of which became successful films. Up the Junction won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize.
