Rotterdam. This item is unavailable.Rotterdam

Washed up far from home at the bitter end of the 70s, Paul spends an ordinary morning travelling to work at the Rotterdam container port and back into the city that evening to work his second job at a burger bar. As the day passes, his mind travels from his childhood in the UK, to an ill-fated love affair on an Left Bank kibbutz, and back to the chance of love in the present. Paul tries to unravel tangled knots of biography, the hopes and disappointments of a short life that still holds future and promise. But, as the torch is put to the last remnants of the hippie dreams he put up with and the harsh 80s economic winter begins to make itself in the frigid cold of a Dutch winters day, Pauls problems are as much philosophical and political as they are personal and ethical. Mixing poignant, slice-of-life narrative with sinuous, deeply argued reflections on a life lived amidst the first brush fires of Consumerism, and asking questions as universal as they demand different answers from each of us, David Battens Rotterdam is an absorbing, thought-provoking brush with the textures, heartbreaks and dilemmas of ordinary life, part novel, part autobiography, part ethical tract, individualistic and thoroughly humanist.

David Batten studied history and ideology at Hull College and Hull University, where he took his Master's degree, and also played back row for Hull & East Riding RFC, before rejoining family in Gwynedd, teaching at Coleg Meirion Dwyfor, then working in community development in North Wales. His debut collection Transhumance was published in 2016; a pamphlet, Storme Passage in 2017; followed by Untergang in 2018, and his most recent collection, Winterreis in 2021, all published by Cinnamon Press. David has also published the prose work, Rotterdam, part autobiography, part philosophical reflection. He now lives in the Aveyron in southern France.