Headhunters - Softcover

John King

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629632260 ISBN 13: 9781629632261

Publisher: PM Press, 2016

Synopsis

FOLLOW-UP TO THE QUARTER-MILLION-SELLING THE FOOTBALL FACTORY

John King's humorous, authentic novel follows five working class London men as their lives run out of control.

HEADHUNTERS is the story of five friends. Carter USM is a live wire who lives on the edge; Mango can't stop thinking; Harry is a beer-lover and dreamer; Balti his drinking partner, out of work and hoping for a fresh start; while Will is the quiet romantic, a voice of reason as the lives of the others become increasingly chaotic.

HEADHUNTERS is also a story of London. The novel is rooted in its streets, workplaces, pubs and music, but a parallel society exists, where the planet's wealthy are able to buy and sell whatever they like. This is a world from which the Londoners of this novel are excluded, resentment too often directed against their own kind. The Unity is the boys' local pub and it is here that they form a tongue-in-cheek Sex Division to celebrate a new year. Based on the idea of a football league, the most Woman can offer Man is four points - unless she leaves her handbag unattended. HEADHUNTERS mixes humour and longing as the real feelings of these men break through.

About this title

Review:

"John King is the authentic voice of contemporary London." --Michael Moorcock, author of The Whispering Swarm

"Brutal, honest and poetic in the way that only a tough guy can be, King loads the gun and shoots us into the lager-filled, lust-fueled lives of five London lads. Headhunters is sexy, dirty, violent, sad and funny; in fact it has just about everything you could want from a book on contemporary working-class life in London." Big Issue

"King loads his characters up with enough interior life, but it's the raw energy of their interactions the beano to Blackpool, the punch-ups, the casual f*cks, the family skeletons and the unburied fantasies that make this excellent book run." --Time Out

Headhunters is an odyssey into southern English blue-collar manners as King deconstructs the stereotype of Essex Man and his outer London contemporaries and finds rather more complex attitudes towards gender and class than the tabloid image suggests." --The List

John King's achievement since his debut has been enormous: creating a modern, proletarian English literature at once genuinely modern, genuinely proletarian, genuinely literature." --Charles Shaar Murray, music journalist and broadcaster

Book Description:

The second in the ground-breaking trilogy which reveals the dark underbelly of 1990s Britain - the football, the camaraderie, the violence.

About this edition

• Publisher: PM Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1629632260
• ISBN 13: 9781629632261
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320