Set in the 1980s, this book 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.

There wasn't much to do in the battered, half-forgotten seaside resort of Jaywick Sands, Essex - nothing really, except to listen to the North Sea pound against the sea-defences and wait for the next run-down holiday shack to go up like a barbeque torch. Lee and Will were an odd pair, deeply eccentric kids, living alone with their mothers and struggling through resit classes in college. But all that was to change on the day they kidnapped Charley Price in an old motor they'd just stolen, and made a heroic run with her for the ferry to the far land where the tulips grow. My Pale Tulip takes a...

Little White Bull takes a fresh look at the times before the day before yesterday, not the end times but the new beginnings, and tries to show how British fiction grappled with subjects as thorny and diverse as the impact of mass immigration and a new kind of rootless working-class character uncontained by previous conceptions of him or herself, and apparently ready to go to war over them. This exciting and readable book presents the fifties and sixties as a crucible of new departures, asking what remains and continues from those decades into the cultural present. It takes the form of a...