Dazed & Aroused
‘A stunning debut novel’ FLUX Magazine
For six hectic months, season to season in the High Fashion calendar, twenty-something male model Alex hurtles between London, Paris and Milan, absorbed in the ruthless world of the catwalk. His long-term girlfriend, Nathalie, is desperate to rekindle their love; his oldest friend, Hugo, though regarding Alex’s so-called career as frivolous, continues to urge fidelity; while his father, reduced to a voice on an answer machine, nevertheless persists in seeking his estranged son’s approval. As his stock as a model soars, Alex is increasingly drawn into a world of predatory sex, drug-induced infatuation and a growing bewilderment with the alluring, seductive shallowness of all he sees around him. The centre cannot hold...
‘Less Than Zero for the Off-Beat Generation’ 3:AM Magazine
Made in Britain
‘A beautifully written story of post-industrial youth’ Owen Jones
Welcome to Every Town in Britain, an awesome abyss where cultures and communities come together, but only with the help of riot gear, and where drugs aren’t a trendy cliché but a necessary evil, consumed not just to get off but to get by. Post-industrial but far from post-class, the people in this forgotten corner of the world are waiting for what comes next — and running out of patience. Made in Britain is a story about growing up in a place like this. Connected by circumstance, the three sixteen-year-old narrators weave a twisted tale of love, lost youth and good old-fashioned violence spanning school, GCSEs and the longest summer holiday of their lives. A novel of both hope and despair, Made in Britain follows the love-hate relationship between a next generation at a crossroads — and the place they call ‘home’.
‘Gavin James Bower’s second novel is a timely portrayal of this country’s disaffected youth, an uncompromising portrait of a community that offers no options, where the only “happy ending” is the kind you pay for...this is an uncomfortably bleak, but ultimately necessary, read’ Independent
‘A poignant tale of the “feral underclass”...what makes the book special is its portrayal of the particular fates of three teenagers who stand for a generation while being utterly and completely themselves’ Jenn Ashworth, Guardian
‘In a world of closed factories and stinking canals, of sex in the school loos, of knives and drugs and moral and economic disintegration, this novel could have been one enormous cliché. It isn’t, though. While not excusing, or attempting to excuse, its protagonists it does succeed in explaining and humanising them. A visceral look at modern society...it will haunt the reader’ Observer
‘The dark young novelist is the writer pontificating politicians should have on the bedside table’ GQ
‘As British as sex behind the bike sheds or a kebab shop punch up’ Iain Aitch, author of We’re British, Innit: An Irreverent A to Z of All Things British
‘Bloody, brutal and swift...like Brighton Rock with sexting’ Gay Times
‘Drugs and sex and violence are simply something to pass the time with in places where manufacturing has died. This novel doesn’t shy away from the unpretty racial tension, either. It’s a lean book about having to survive but not quite letting your dreams go. Gavin James Bower evokes the escape exits from those post-industrial towns so well. Sadly for many they remain simply chemical’ Suzanne Moore
‘A serious attempt at writing about the 1990s generation...Bower gets into the teenage head so well that you start to think the book was written by a teenager...the language is so emotive at times it makes you wince’ 3:AM Magazine
‘If I was 16, trying to learn the difference between right and wrong in a country where it’s ok for chief execs and bankers to take what they want at the same time as we chastise a few hoodies for smashing windows, Gavin James Bower might be the voice of my generation’ Bookmunch
‘Our disgustingly out of touch Prime Minister would do well to read this shocking, heart-wrenching tale of no-hope in the recession hit, morally devalued North’ Daily Mirror
‘A subtle yet powerful insight into the type of youngsters society normally marginalises...there is an Orwellian anger about this book that makes it hard to put down’ Huffington Post
Claude Cahun: The Soldier with No Name
‘A perfect introduction’ David Rose
Claude Cahun is the most important artist you’ve never heard of — until now. Writer, photographer, lesbian; revolutionary activist, surrealist, resistance fighter — Cahun witnessed the birth of the Paris avant-garde, lived through two World Wars and, as ‘Der Soldat ohne Namen’, risked death by inciting mutiny on Nazi-occupied Jersey. And yet, she’s until recently been merely a peripheral figure in these world-shaping events, relegated by academics to the footnotes in the history of art, sexual politics and revolutionary movements of the last century. Now more so than ever, Cahun demands a significant presence in the history of surrealism and the avant-garde — even, in the canon of early twentieth-century literature. Indeed her one major book, Disavowals, is a masterpiece of anti-memoir writing. Much has been made of her as a photographer, but Claude Cahun ‘the writer’ was both radical and prescient. At a time when her star is rising like never before Claude Cahun: The Soldier with No Name represents the first explicit attempt in English to posit Cahun as an important figure in her own right, and to popularise one of the most influential artists of her generation.