NIGHT HAUNTS: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE LONDON NIGHT
BY SUKHDEV SANDHU
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“Sandhu is a master of the revelatory detail… NIGHT HAUNTS, like the finest poetry, contains multitudes.” – Gareth Evans, TIME OUT
“An extraordinary echo-sounding of the contemporary London night – lyrical, hallucinatory and harrowing by turns” – Bharat Tandon, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
“Reads like a novel but has the immediacy of good reportage…You come away in awe at all that goes on in the capital on an average evening – and full of respect for an author who has left the study to discover how things really work.” – Alain de Botton, OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR
“Brilliantly illuminated… Sandhu lets the ghosts speak.’ – Ken Worpole, INDEPENDENT
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“Over the course of the next year, I will be journeying from dusk until dawn; by road, air and water; from its concrete centre to its pastoral fringes... I want to locate the ghosts of old London.”-Sukhdev Sandhu
Selected by Malcolm Burgess as one of the GUARDIAN’s Ten Best Books on London, Burgess suggests that “London from the air at night has its own special beauty, as Sukdhev Sandhu discovers when he accompanies those who patrol the city's skies between nightfall and dawn: ‘The streets of London are made from gold. But only at night time and only from the sky. They lie there glimmering like a Hatton Garden window display. Jewelled necklaces winking at us. At Piccadilly Circus and along Oxford Street the refracted neon gives them a ruby-red and emerald-green lustre.’"
In the early twentieth century, London by night was historically famed for its depravity and pestilence, attracting busloads of tourists from all over the world to gawp at the freaks, whores and bandits who populated the nightscape. But is it now as unthreatening as any modern town?
Inspired by the 1920s travel writer, H. V. Morton, who explored nocturnal London discovering the worlds of the ‘work’o’nights’ or ‘owls of London’, who he found repairing the Underground, partying in Chinese cafes in Limehouse or waiting at stage doors, Sukhdev Sandhu set off to find out. Night Haunts is the record of his journey across London to meet the people who drive the night pulse, from the avian police to the nuns who pray at all hours of day and night for the souls of Londoners. He wades through the sewers, follows graffiti artists as they paint the city and accompanies the marine patrol looking for midnight corpses.
In the course of his nocturnal adventures, Sandhu reflects on the nature of the urban night: does the quality of night change between 1am and 4am, and between the East End and the West? Has 'night life' been gradually corroded and colonised by light and entertainment? What are the invisible economies that pulse through the sleeping city? Is authentic darkness impossible? Do we need darkness?
Beautifully written, Night Haunts seeks to reclaim the mystery and romance of the city, to revitalize the great myth of London for a new century.
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SUKHDEV SANDHU is the author of the acclaimed LONDON CALLING: HOW BLACK AND ASIAN WRITERS IMAGINED A CITY. He lives in New York and London, and writes for the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT and MODERN PAINTERS. He is the award-winning chief film critic of the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and Associate Professor of English Literature at New York University.
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ISBN: 978 1 84467 655 2 / £7.99 / Paperback / 144 pages
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For more information about NIGHT HAUNTS or to buy the book visit:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/553-night-haunts
See also the NIGHT HAUNTS website:
www.nighthaunts.org/uk
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