Need - Hardcover

Cohn, Nik

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0436203391 ISBN 13: 9780436203398

Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1996

Synopsis

New York is in the grip of a murderous heatwave. Four lives come together, a reformed psychic, a young Puerto Rican hustler, a belly dancer and a black Irishman from Donegal. Meanwhile, in the subways, a sect called the Black Swans gather awaiting the apocalypse.

About this title

Review

"A grand tour of the fringes of functioning society in England . . . A masterpiece of good writing, human sympathy and fine, understated characterisation . . . Affectionately teasing his subjects, as Dickens does, [Cohn] achieves more for them than hero-worship or vilification ever could."--Independent on Sunday Forget about cricket, tea with the vicar and the changing of the guard (and about the much-hyped Cool Britannia as well), and encounter a hidden nation--the many millions who've fallen out of the mainstream, or chosen to jump. Nik Cohn's kaleidoscopic England is made up of techno-freaks and soccer-obsessives, faith healers and fetishists, graffiti artists, Odinists, Rastas, Elvis impersonators, even the Antichrist. Armed with insatiable curiosity and guided by Mary Carson, an unstoppable Irish firebrand, Cohn whirls from the changing countryside of Cornwall and East Anglia to the ravaged postindustrial North, from riotous seaside towns to London netherworlds. Whether rampaging native or second-generation immigrant, each member of this remarkable chorus has a distinct story and a voice to match, and their lives define a world cut loose from tradition and all certainty. Gone bananas, in fact. "Triumphantly [exposing] England's underbelly in all its grotesque glory, Cohn has the kind of empathetic imagination that can locate and communicate the residual beauty in damaged human beings. He transcribes their whirling thoughts and fantasies into a considered and elegiac poetry." --Financial Times "England has never seemed so strange, so poignant, or so exhilarating . . . Perhaps it is his own sense of displacement--born in Ireland, raised in England and nowresident in America--that lends Cohn a natural sympathy for the outsider. His great gift is not simply his extravagant, firecracker prose, but an ability to insinuate himself into the confidence and under the skin of his subjects; to dissect their foibles, yet leave them with their humanity and dignity intact." --Daily Telegraph "From the Hardcover edition."

Book Description

SALES POINTS: * 'Prose that drives the novel along at a cracking pace. . . a wonderfully understanding book. . . Marvellous stuff' - Time Out. * 'A lot of people are going to love this book' - Literary Review. * 'Cohn remains the class player. . . Definitely the hottest read of the summer' - The Times. * Highly respected Guadian correspondent.

Edition details

• Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0436203391
• ISBN 13: 9780436203398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288