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.
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 -- Steve Grant * Time Out * 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 -- Stephen Chamberlain * Big Issue * 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 -- Teddy Jamieson * The List * The realism and political edge echoes Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff -- John Williams * GQ *