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News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

not-for-profit - a workers'co-op - committed to social justice | 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY - 0151 708 7270

This Brutal House

by Niven Govinden - £8.99  Little, Brown Book Group (2020)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780349700694 | ISBN 10: 0349700699

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2019
 
On the steps of New York's City Hall, five ageing Mothers sit in silent protest. They are the guardians of the vogue ball community - queer men who opened their hearts and homes to countless lost Children, providing safe spaces for them to explore their true selves. Through epochs of city nightlife, from draconian to liberal, the Children have been going missing; their absences ignored by the authorities and uninvestigated by the police.
 
In a final act of dissent the Mothers have come to pray: to expose their personal struggle beneath our age of protest, and commemorate their loss until justice is served. Watching from City Hall's windows is city clerk, Teddy. Raised by the Mothers, he is now charged with brokering an uneasy truce.
 
With echoes of James Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson and Rachel Kushner, Niven Govinden asks what happens when a generation remembered for a single, lavish decade has been forced to grow up, and what it means to be a parent in a confused and complex society.

"[A] vibrant novel... Acerbic, encompassing, funny and mounting towards the spiritual, Govinden's book shows the complexity of drag balls and queer life. This is an important, and in places an experimental book, full of spark and wisdom. Its tone is in places elegiac, in others vibrant. Like the best drag acts, This Brutal House leaves its reader full of a powerful, protesting energy."
(Irish Times)

(Price & availability last checked: June 2020)

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