Grits Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Grits Book

With such classics as Generation X and Trainspotting, notions of generational angst are still a fertile breeding ground of forceful expression for authors. Now we have Grits, a complex debut from Niall Griffiths, in which the lives of a group of disenfranchised loners are laid bare as they confront their own anger at society and the ruin it has made of their lives. Set in the socially complex late 1990s, these drifters meet in a small coastal village in West Wales, brought there as they attempt to escape their various addictions (drugs, alcohol, crime, promiscuity) and find a place where they can dissect and extract meaning from their damaged lives. The setting of the novel is an intriguing premise in itself: an isolated village, wedged between two of natures more inhospitable locales, the sea and mountains. It is a cunning tool, reinforcing the trapped nature of these lives, no matter the reasons they ended up there. Equally successful is Griffith's use of language: each of the characters narrative is written in a "phonetic" style, which allows their personalities and emotions to erupt from the page: Evil is not an amorphous, anonymous fing; it has a house an a family, it eats breakfast, it wears certain clowthes an squirms tentacles in ta every aspect av ya life. It will neva give in ... Right now, someone is lacing up their polished black shoes and double-checking your address. Run. It makes it hard-going but perseverance yields effective results. Though it lacks the full-on deviant humour of Trainspotting, Grits certainly shares that book's incisive and gritty glimpse into a potent underclass who have willingly embraced an ideology of disenchantment, expressed through petty addictions and fuelled by relentless anger. An exciting debut that will appeal to the legions of people who feel such pain to whatever degree. --Danny GraydonRead More

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  • Foyles

    In the late 1990s, a group of young drifters from various parts of Britain find themselves washed up together in a small town on the west coast of Wales, fixed between mountains and sea. Here, they both explore and attempt to overcome those yearnings and addictions which have brought them to this place: promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, petty crime, the intense and angry search for the meaning which they feel life lacks at the arse-end of this momentous century. A novel about the dispossessed and disenfranchised, about people with no further to fall, Grits is also resolutely about the spirit of the individual, and each character's story is told in their own rich, powerful dialect. Through their voices, the novel charts this chapter in their lives, presenting, with humour and rage and a deep underlying sadness, a picture of the diversity and waste that is life in Britain today.A work of power, passion and enormous originality, Grits describes - in language both mythic and demotic - ways of living that appear squalid but which aspire to the spiritual. As a novel that speaks for an under-class and a sub-culture, it stands comparison with Cain's Book and Trainspotting.

  • ASDA

    In the late 1990s a group of young drifters find themselves together on the coast of Wales. They explore and attempt to overcome the yearnings and addictions that brought them this place promiscuity drugs petty crime the intense and angry search for the meaning which they feel life is lacking at the end of this momentous century.

  • 0099285177
  • 9780099285175
  • Niall Griffiths
  • 1 February 2001
  • Vintage
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 496
  • New edition
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