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Peterdown
On sale
6th May 2021
Price: £16.99
McKitterick Prize, 2022
Genre
‘A book from the psychic fault lines of 21st Century Britain, Peterdown‘s big ambitions never lose sight of the human and everyday. The result is something simultaneously down to earth and epic’ Johny Pitts, author of Afropean
Peterdown, an industrial town with a noble past and a lacklustre present, has been chosen as the regional hub for a soon-to-be-built, ultra-high-speed railway line. The development promises to propel Peterdown headlong into a prosperous future; but in order to get there, something from the landscape of Peterdown’s past will have to be demolished. On the shortlist are the Larkspur Hill housing estate, a significant modernist landmark, and the Chapel, the raucous home of the town’s football team, Peterdown United. Ellie Ferguson, an architect exiled from London, is as determined to save the Larkspur as her partner, Colin, a lifelong United fan, is desperate to save the Chapel. As they each find themselves leading increasingly passionate and opposing campaigns, their essential differences become hard to ignore.
Out of this spins an epic, wide-angle novel, rich with character and incident. Affairs are embarked upon. Conspiracies are uncovered. A broad-based popular insurgency ignites. Peterdown brings England’s beleaguered streetscape to life and finds lurking there a playful and storied counterculture: mad monks and machine breakers, avant-gardists and non-conformists.
Full of warmth, comedy, character and anarchic radicalism, Peterdown is an ambitious tale about work and play, community and place, and how, ultimately, we might live in the face of history.
Peterdown, an industrial town with a noble past and a lacklustre present, has been chosen as the regional hub for a soon-to-be-built, ultra-high-speed railway line. The development promises to propel Peterdown headlong into a prosperous future; but in order to get there, something from the landscape of Peterdown’s past will have to be demolished. On the shortlist are the Larkspur Hill housing estate, a significant modernist landmark, and the Chapel, the raucous home of the town’s football team, Peterdown United. Ellie Ferguson, an architect exiled from London, is as determined to save the Larkspur as her partner, Colin, a lifelong United fan, is desperate to save the Chapel. As they each find themselves leading increasingly passionate and opposing campaigns, their essential differences become hard to ignore.
Out of this spins an epic, wide-angle novel, rich with character and incident. Affairs are embarked upon. Conspiracies are uncovered. A broad-based popular insurgency ignites. Peterdown brings England’s beleaguered streetscape to life and finds lurking there a playful and storied counterculture: mad monks and machine breakers, avant-gardists and non-conformists.
Full of warmth, comedy, character and anarchic radicalism, Peterdown is an ambitious tale about work and play, community and place, and how, ultimately, we might live in the face of history.
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Reviews
'A warm and engrossing novel about how space and place shapes our lives and relationships, as well as being a potent resource of collective power. It was deeply gratifying to get acquainted with Annand's fully-realised cast of characters and with the ?ctional city of Peterdown itself, vividly detailed through sections of football podcast dialogue and winding architecture tours with an acerbic unknown critic'
Entertaining, acute and remarkably prescient
A very modern English satire . . . Peterdown follows a long tradition of fictional civic affairs, brilliantly done in the 40s and 50s but still funny and absorbing today
A book from the psychic fault lines of 21st Century Britain, Peterdown's big ambitions never lose sight of the human and everyday. The result is something simultaneously down to earth and epic
Madcap, hugely rich and entertaining
Peterdown is a state-of-the-nation work evincing a sweeping preoccupation with ideas of community, space and place . . . a timely book, clear in its concerns and vital in its focus.
David Annand is a great storyteller who has suddenly arrived in the front rank of contemporary novelists with a book that is witty, touching, loaded with drama and, most crucially, lays bare the cultural and class divisions that run through present-day British society. Along the way, from the Fall to the steak bake at Greggs to football culture, he understands the poetry of everyday life in all its infinite bittersweet detail
A captivating parable about how we understand place. . . Annand's narrative speaks volumes about how culture configures our relationship to physical space . . . Peterdown makes for engrossing reading
Annand's class politics are razor sharp; Peterdown is What a Carve Up! for the post-crash era of gentrification and Iconic developments, skewering many of the bromides of contemporary politics and culture along the way
Few novels quite match David Annand's debut . . . so enjoyable to read: the deft and humorous telling of people trying to muddle through modern life