HACKNEY, THAT ROSE-RED EMPIRE: A CONFIDENTIAL REPORT

Author(s): SINCLAIR IAIN

Fiction

Once an Arcadian suburb of grand houses, orchards and conservatories, Hackney declined into a zone of asylums, hospitals and dirty industry. Persistently revived, reinvented, betrayed, it has become a symbol of inner-city chaos, crime and poverty. Now, the Olympics, a final attempt to clamp down on a renegade spirit, seeks to complete the process: erasure disguised as 'progress'. In this 'documentary fiction', Sinclair meets a cast of the dispossessed, including writers, photographers, bomb-makers and market traders. Legends of tunnels, Hollow Earth theories and the notorious Mole Man are unearthed. He uncovers traces of those who passed through Hackney: Lenin and Stalin, novelists Joseph Conrad and Samuel Richardson, film-makers Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard, Tony Blair beginning his political career, even a Baader-Meinhof urban guerrilla on the run. And he tells his own story: of forty years in one house in Hackney, of marriage, children, strange encounters, deaths.


Product Information

Shortlisted for Ondaatje Prize 2010.

Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital and Dining on Stones. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.

General Fields

  • : 9780241142165
  • : UNID
  • : UNID
  • : 0.905
  • : February 2009
  • : 240mm X 162mm X 50mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : SINCLAIR IAIN
  • : BB
  • : 1
  • : 823.914
  • : 592
  • : B/W interleaved