Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project - Hardcover

Sinclair, Iain

3.47

156 ratings by Goodreads

9780241144350: Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241144353 ISBN 13: 9780241144350

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2011

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Beginning in his east London home many years before it will be invaded by the Olympian machinery of global capitalism, Sinclair strikes out near and far in search of the forgotten and erased. He travels from the mouth of the Thames to Oxford, crosses Morecambe Bay in the footsteps of drowned Chinese cockle pickers, and visits an Athenian, post-Olympics landscape of vast and deserted stadia.

It is a story of incident and accident, of the curious meeting the bizarre. Sinclair writes of being a labourer in Stratford, of Orwellian steps to ban a book launch in a library, of the fundamentalist visions of J.G. Ballard. Stories of police raids and mass expulsions jostle with accounts of failed grand projects: the Millennium Dome, Thames Gateway, and numerous other half-completed, ill-advised or abandoned structures.

Burrowing under the perimeter fence of the grandest of Grand Projects - the giant myth that is 2012's London Olympics - Ghost Milk is a road map to a possible future as well as Iain Sinclair's most powerful statement yet on the throwaway impermanence of the present.

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Review:

Ghost Milk reads like a meld of poet Allen Ginsberg, comic books writer Alan Moore and an anarchists' message board . . . There is no doubt that Sinclair is original, observant, a wonderful phrase maker (Evening Standard)

A wise, irascible sentinel: a guardian seeking to protect London's true soul from profiteering interventions by redevelopers and "regenerators" . . . Uncomfortable, sharp and amusing . . . Grippingly atmospheric . . . Fascinating . . . One of our most dazzling prose stylists (Daily Telegraph)

Dazzling prose . . . his language is always heightened . . . Sinclair's explorations by foot are highly engaging and anything but pedestrian (Sunday Telegraph)

A scorching 400-page diatribe against this and other "grand projects" . . . [Sinclair is] a crazily knowledgeable local historian with a shaman's grasp of strange energies, unseen ley lines, urban esoterica (Independent Magazine)

About the Author:

Iain Sinclair is the author of numerous works of fiction, poetry non-fiction, including Lud Heat; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Downriver; Radon Daughters; Lights Out for the Territory; Rodinsky's Room, with Rachel Lichtenstein; Landor's Tower; London Orbital; Dining On Stones; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk; American Smoke and London Overground. Downriver won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award. He lives in Hackney, east London.

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