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Soho
On sale
18th October 2001
Price: £6.99
No London neighbourhood more resembles the restless downstream tide of the Thames than the ragged square mile of Soho, and into this human rabbit warren one evening slips Alex Singer, a student from Leeds in pursuit of his errant girlfriend. Twenty-four hours, three deaths, one fire and one mugging later, seduced, traduced and befriended, Alex is on his way to the Soho Ball. In this fast, funny and superbly crafted novel, Keith Waterhouse draws a vibrant portrait of London’s liveliest quarter past and present and of its eccentric inhabitants.
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Reviews
Quite easily the wittiest and best chronicler of contemporary life
His comic evocation of place and people and his humane descriptions of Soho's lowlife bring the present and the past effortlessly together.
You stay gripped from the opening paragraph ... It crackles with insight about the nature of sexual obsession
Waterhouse uses Alex's saucer-eyed awareness of "So-oh's" otherness to take the reader on a wistful and gently amusing trawl through the area. Even episodes of sexual perversion and murder are recounted with a deft lightness of touch, though a metropolitan cynicism lurks on the peripheries of this entertaining farce.
Keith Waterhouse's satire of London life is pin-sharp and teeming with gloriously reprehensible characters. He is one of Britain's finest journalists. SOHO is a timely reminder of how good a storyteller he is.
He can be angrily oratorical, bluntly rude, soberly informative, boozily clownish, but cannot stop being very, very funny
A treat for sore brains
With its breakneck pacing and kinetic characters, SOHO captures the ever- morphing nature of the area.
highly entertaining. Rather like a night out in Soho.
A timely reminder of how good a storyteller he is.
Pin-sharp and teeming with gloriously reprehensible characters
The work of a master
Effortlessly brilliant . . . a comedy of London life which tastes as fresh as a new-baked croissant
Waterhouse . . . at his most entertaining and mischievous
As well as being a fast-paced farce, a string of encounters and incidents that could keep a full pub of people entertained for several evenings on end, [it] is an elegy to a vanishing world. Soho the place may not be quite what it was, but in Soho the novel, Waterhouse brings it vibrantly to life
A wonderful evocation of a part of London the author loves and he has succeeded superbly in capturing its sleazy yet alluring nature