The North West Parallel 1999: Revised Edition (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798198781689)

The North West Parallel 1999

London, 1998. William Dann is twenty-two years old, newly evicted, and starting over in a bedsit above a newsagent's in the north west of the city. What he finds there - a Scottish barber who plays music too loud, a Trinidadian music pioneer who remembers when the streets weren't safe, a Polish judo coach washing dishes to feed his children - is an unlikely community built quietly in the gaps between other people's London.

By day William works the silver service at one of the city's grandest hotels, invisible to the guests he serves. By night he moves through the late-night world of the BackBeat club, where music has always been the answer to division. As the millennium approaches, three nail bombs tear through Brixton, Brick Lane and Old Compton Street, and William finds himself asking the question a generation hoped they'd already answered: how does this keep happening?

The North West Parallel 1999 is a story about what it felt like to be young in a city still fighting old battles - the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, institutional racism, the politics of fear dressed up as pride. It is also a love story, a portrait of friendship across every boundary that was supposed to keep people apart, and a reminder that the distance between 1999 and now is shorter than we would like to believe.