Human Punk

A rich and passionate novel about the glory days of punk and reggae in London's satellite towns.

In its ambition and exuberance, Human Punk is a league ahead of much contemporary English fiction

King's eye for detail is as sharp as his characters' tongues, and his creations are eminently three-dimensional: insightful and funny one minute, bigoted and ******-up the next

Unique and brutal fiction...King is a master of idiom and street slang

King's most accomplished and compelling story to date

John King is the author of nine novels - The Football Factory, Headhunters, England Away, Human Punk, White Trash, The Prison House, Skinheads, The Liberal Politics Of Adolf Hitler and Slaughterhouse Prayer. The Football Factory has been turned into a high-profile film and his books have been widely translated abroad. He has also written short stories and non-fiction for a number of publications over the years, with articles appearing in the likes of The New Statesman, Le Monde and La Repubblica. He edits the fiction fanzine Verbal and lives in London.

For fifteen-year-old Martin, growing up in Slough, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, reggae music, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cut-throat Teds and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet - until he is beaten up and thrown in the Grand Union Canal with his best mate Smiles. 
 
Fast forward to 1988, and Joe is traveling home on the Trans-Siberian express after three years working in a Hong Kong bar, remembering the highs and lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with catastrophe. 
 
Fast forward to 2000, and Joe is sitting pretty - earning a living as a DJ, selling records and fight tickets. Life is sweet again - until a face from the past forces him to re-live that night in 1977 and deal with the fall-out.

England Away

Having examined England's twin obsessions - violence and sex - in THE FOOTBALL FACTORY and HEADHUNTERS, John King completes his trilogy with ENGLAND AWAY: sex and violence abroad, under the Union Jack. The novel works on three levels - past, present and future - as pensioner Bill Farrell remembers his war experiences in a London pub, Tommy Johnson fights his way through Holland and Germany for an England football match in Berlin, and Harry considers the future fuelled by doses of Dutch skunk and German speed. John King's powerful new novel looks at notions of what it means to be English. Exploring stereotypes of language and nationalism, the primal pulls of lust and aggression, ENGLAND AWAY culminates in a unity of the tribes and a blitzkreig in the streets of Berlin.

Headhunters

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

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 fucks, the family skeletons and the unburied fantasies - that make this excellent book run

Sexy, dirty, violent, sad, funny: in fact it has just about everything you could want from a book on contemporary working-class life in London

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 realism and political edge echoes Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff

Following on from his bestselling study of violence, The Football Factory, John King considers Britain's other obsession - sex. Formed in the chemical mists of New Year's Eve, The Sex Division sees the once sacred act of procreation at its most material, as five men devise a system based on the sexual act. In this lager-soaked league, the most that women can offer a man is 4 points - unless, that is, she leaves her handbag unattended... 
 
From its base in the asset-stripped, emotionally castrated 90s, Headhunters shows the dreams of The Sex Division members breaking through the heavy media cloud of anorexic pin-ups and paedophile fashion. A missing brother, prophetic visions, a love affair, and tit-for-tat confrontation draw the characters out into the open - revealing the men behind the machismo, their need for mutual respect, and their recognition of the hidden or suppressed affinities.

The Football Factory

'The best book I've read about football and working-class culture in Britain in the nineties. Buy, steal or borrow a copy now' 
Irvine Welsh

The best book I've read about football and working-class culture in Britain in the nineties. Buy, steal or borrow a copy now

Fever Pitch with testosterone and eight pints of lager. Like Fever Pitch, it is not exclusively a novel about football. This is a chronicle of a lost tribe – the white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual who is fed up with being told he is crap.

Not only an outstanding read, but also an important social document... This book should be compulsory reading for all those who believe in the existence, or even attainability, of a classless society

Powerfully written and tells you more about the mentality of those who disrupt football matches than all the theses of the sociologist academics put together

Bleak, thought-provoking and brutal... Has all the hallmarks of a cult novel

The Football Factory centres on Tom Johnson, a reasoned 'Chelsea hooligan' who represents a disaffected society operating by brutal rules. We are shown the realities of life - social degradation, unemployment, racism, casual violence, excessive drink and bad sex - and, perhaps more importantly, how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division. 
 
Graphic and disturbing, sometimes very funny, and deeply affecting throughout, The Football Factory is a vertiginous rush of adrenaline - the most authentic book yet on the so-called English Disease.

John King

King...offers a nuanced argument for skinhead culture

An energetic and technically adroit writer

King's achievement since his debut has been enormous: creating a modern, proletarian English literature at once genuinely modern, genuinely proletarian, genuinely English and genuinely literature. His novels immerse his readers in the stream of consciousness of people who, as routinely depicted in the media, barely have consciousness at all

King is a master of idiom and street slang. He speaks with a voice that appears to be the true expression of disaffected white British youth

Skinheads is the story of a way of life, told through three generations of a family: Terry English, original ska-loving skinhead and boss of a mini-cab firm; Nutty Ray, street-punk skin and active football hooligan; and Lol, son of Terry, nephew of Ray, a fifteen-year-old kid just starting out. 
 
Terry is sick and not sure he's going to make his fiftieth birthday, but is kept going by his music, his lovely assistant Angie, and his discovery of the abandoned Union Jack Club, which he decides to clean up and re-open. Ray, meanwhile, is out driving mini-cabs and struggling to control his anger - his only release: days out with Chelsea's finest. But when he takes the law into his own hands in an explosion of righteous violence, his future starts to darken.

Skinheads

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John King

Praise for Skinheads

King...offers a nuanced argument for skinhead culture

An energetic and technically adroit writer

King's achievement since his debut has been enormous: creating a modern, proletarian English literature at once genuinely modern, genuinely proletarian, genuinely English and genuinely literature. His novels immerse ...

King...offers a nuanced argument for skinhead culture

An energetic and technically adroit writer

King's achievement since his debut has been enormous: creating a modern, proletarian English literature at once genuinely modern, genuinely proletarian, genuinely English and genuinely literature. His novels immerse ...

King...offers a nuanced argument for skinhead culture

An energetic and technically adroit writer

King's achievement since his debut has been enormous: creating a modern, proletarian English literature at once genuinely modern, genuinely proletarian, genuinely English and genuinely literature. His novels immerse ...

Books by John King

Series by John King

The Football Factory Trilogy

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