The Bricks That Built the Houses - Softcover

Tempest, Kate

3.8

6,354 ratings by Goodreads

9781620409039: The Bricks That Built the Houses

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1620409038 ISBN 13: 9781620409039

Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA, 2017

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The debut novel from "dynamic" "wunderkind" Kate Tempest proves her talent to be boundless and unstoppable.*

Becky, Harry, and Leon are leaving London in a fourth-hand Ford with a suitcase full of stolen money, in a mess of tangled loyalties and impulses. But can they truly leave the city that's in their bones?

Kate Tempest's novel reaches back through time--through tensely quiet dining rooms and crassly loud clubs--to the first time Becky and Harry meet. It sprawls through their lives and those they touch--of their families and friends and faces on the street--revealing intimacies and the moments that make them. And it captures the contemporary struggle of urban life, of young people seeking jobs or juggling jobs, harboring ambitions and making compromises.

The Bricks that Built the Houses is an unexpected love story. It's about being young, but being part of something old. It's about how we become ourselves, and how we effect our futures. Rich in character and restless in perspective, driven by ethics and empathy, it asks--and seeks to answer--how best to live with and love one another.

*Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

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Review:

"Ms. Tempest has an ability to write about big, metaphysical subjects in the most vernacular language, while conjuring a sense of contemporary English life with a handful of chiseled lines . . . She demonstrates a knack . . . for being able to shuttle easily back and forth between the mundane and the mythic, the banal and philosophical." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Citing both the poet William Blake and the rapper RZA among her influences, she is a powerful mix of innocence and experience with a growing, and fervent, following . . . Ms. Tempest's work jumps boundaries." --Rachel Donadio, The New York Times

"[A] remarkable, powerful collection . . . These are acute and insightful poems that lodge in the ear and sear themselves on the vision." --Best Poetry Books of 2014, The Guardian on HOLD YOUR OWN

"A virtuoso . . . Tempest threads a needle between Pete Rock and Homer . . . [She is] reporting live from the Colosseum, reminding us that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." --Barnes and Noble Review

Book Description:

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Award-winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest's electrifying debut novel takes us into the beating heart of the capital in this multi-generational tale of drugs, desire and belonging

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