Boxer Handsome
by Anna Whitwham
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Pub Date Jan 16 2014 | Archive Date Feb 14 2014
Random House UK, Vintage Publishing | Vintage Digital
Description
'A genuinely impressive debut. Boxer Handsome does everything great fiction should... revealing a world that most people will never even think about. If you can't see what it is that people need from boxing, or why it somehow persists into the 21st century, then read this' -- Guardian
Boxing runs in Bobby’s blood. His Irish dad was a boxer. So was his Jewish grandfather. Yanked up by their collars at Clapton Bow Boys Club, taught how to box and stay out of trouble.
So Bobby knows he shouldn’t be messing in street brawls a week before his big fight with Connor ‘the Gypsy Boy’, an Irish traveller from around the way. They’re fighting over Theresa: a traveller girl with Connor’s name all over her. But Bobby’s handsome, like his dad; boxer handsome.
For Bobby, the ring is everywhere and he can’t afford to lose.
A Note From the Publisher
UK edition - available for readers in the UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) only.
Advance Praise
A tremendous debut -- lean but capacious, elegant but tough, tempered but resonant. It marks the arrival of an important new talent.
Anna Whitwham's own East Side Story,
set between two rival families in Clapton, is a vivid evocation of the
worlds of old and new London, of the tribal immigrant experience built
between boxing gym, tenement and canal bank. By turns brutal and beautiful, tender and dangerous, Boxer Handsome is a visceral and luminous debut. - Cathi Unsworth, author of Weirdo
Boxer Handsome is a story told in hope's shadow, where life, organised and disorganised, scars. This is a compelling novel - brutal, tender and true. - Joe Stretch, author of Friction and The Adult
So
good it hurts. Anna Whitwham joins the very best to have written about
boxing: F.X. Toole, Joyce Carol Oates, Harry Crews and Norman Mailer. - Nick Stone, boxer and author of Mr Clarinet
Marketing Plan
‘This England was shit, Bobby thought. Who would live in this?’:
last year, East End London was covered in Olympic glory, with Danny
Boyle’s opening ceremony celebrating the best of British, and Britain
winning three Gold medals in boxing. Boxer Handsome shows us
another, very different, side to east London: a post-Thatcher world of
council estates, booze and bad blood, of a community up against itself, ‘all fighting a corner; all fighting for space. All up for a fight’.
A fresh new voice for the Chatto list: Anna’s prose is sparse, muscular and unembossed, and immediately distinctive. This
is a tough prose from a female writer who articulates what it's like to
be, in the words of Irvine Welsh, "young, working class and British"
In our Chav-bashing climate, Boxer gives us a flawed hero trying to break out of the cycle of violence and make a better life for himself. This book gives him a voice and brings him into the light.
A world the author knows well:
Anna's granddad, John Poppy, escaped a life of poverty and street
violence by joining Crown & Manor Boys' Club in Hoxton, and becoming
a featherweight boxer. He is the inspiration behind this book.
Anna is 31 years old, highly articulate and promotable: she lectures at Royal Holloway where she teaches a course called 'Writing Men: The Burden of Masculinity'
Available Editions
| EDITION | Ebook |
| ISBN | 9781448180028 |
| PRICE | £7.99 (GBP) |
