I'm reading this wonderful book at the moment. The notice below is forwarded from another list.

R

LONDON BRAKES BY JOHN MUCKLE

Paperback, 294pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848611016

Tony Guest is welcome wherever he goes—a motorcycle courier on a big bike, 
picking up and dropping all manner of urgent parcels, letters, and duly 
getting his dockets signed. In July he rides in a sweat bath, in February 
the rain is freezing needles, the roads of the West End are greasy with 
spilt diesel, glistening tracks of motorcyclists weaving through them like 
slug trails. But where is Tony going? What is contained in his ultimate 
mystery packet? What becomes of lost friendships? He chases his shadow-man 
through an illusory maze of skid pans, trick exits—the answer to every 
question he can frame seems to lie behind every locked door in London 
town. Set in the 1980s, London Brakes shows us an England of conflicting 
loyalties and low impostures—a city divided by inequality and opportunism: 
a place where forgetting is compulsory and paranoia is the outcome. Tony 
is determined to cut through it all to the truths of his life. 

Praise for John Muckle:

"The milky bar gleam of Kensington in the sun . . . memory of Spitalfields 
in the rain . . . a small flask of Southern Comfort . . . John Muckle's 
window on that world is the one people will eventually look through." —Tom 
Raworth

"It's a wonderful book—marvellously constructed, and of a fidelity to 
experience such as you only come across with a true storyteller—as 
distinct from word spinner! I congratulate you—I'd love to read more by 
you—and . . . from my heart I thank you." —John Berger

"I don't think I've read anything for quite a while—perhaps not since 
Norman Lewis' memoir Jackdaw Cake—which conjures up quite so effectively 
this peculiar inter-zone between the behemoth of the city and the 
hinterland of the country. And on top of all of this there is the 
wrenching portrayal of a family at odds with itself in the most violent 
fashion, rendered without cant or sentimentality." —Will Self

"I think Cyclomotors is my best book of 1997 and a real bit of quality in 
a fairly bleak landscape." —Michael Moorcock

 

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