There are all the joys of Ken Champion's writing here - a vivid depiction of time and place created with painterly skill, telling humour and characters both bound by and railing against society's expectations. This is a world rich and busy with the banter, camaraderie and cruelty of daily life, with painful truths beneath. At its heart is the story of Ben, coming of age in the East End of the fifties, whose encounter with the adventurous, liberated Beat Years is merely glanced in the pages of Kerouac's On The Road. His struggle to move beyond the grey predictability and stifling life mapped...