Futures

(Paperback)

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Description

1987. Carol is a small-time cocaine dealer in London. One of her customers is Phil, a financial analyst in the City who fantasises about a cocaine futures market while on a coke binge. When the cocaine futures market becomes a reality, Carol has an opportunity to go for the big deal that could get her out of the business for good. Meanwhile, a market crash creates havoc, and a hurricane sweeps across London, ripping down the communication systems of the stock market itself. Carol must make her choice as three very different worlds are about to collide.

Reviews

"In Futures, John Barker has produced a fast-paced, hard-boiled novel that pulls you back, effortlessly, into morally corrupt Thatcherite London. Barker's crisp, laconic, prose, eye-for-detail storytelling, command of the art of narrative, and his ear for fluid and convincing dialogue makes him, in my view, Hackney's worthy successor to Tom Wolfe."
--Stuart Christie, author of Granny Made Me an Anarchist

"John Barker's prose is so downbeat he leaves even the most gritty of crime novelists looking like they're aiming for the preteen market. But if you want to get beyond the fairy tale version of the sordid underbelly of life, then you gotta check Futures out."
--Stewart Home, author of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess

"In this fast-paced, streetwise take on eighties London, boundaries blur between the cocaine trade and newly deregulated financial markets. High and low life don't look so different, as everyone tries to make a killing. Barker's portrait of a cynical, money-hungry culture skewers a moment in history that for good or ill (and mostly for ill) made Britain what it is today."
--Hari Kunzru, author of The Impressionist

"The prose grabs you by the throat and squeezes. The characters are by turns reckless, ambitious, vulnerable, and weak. The story is set in the past but couldn't be more relevant. Futures is funny, frightening, and very dark."
--Ronan Bennett, author of The Catastrophist

Author Bio

John Barker is a writer and book indexer. He is the author of Bending the Bars, a memoir of the time he spent in prison as a result of a conviction for conspiring to cause explosions. He served an additional five-year sentence in the early 1990s for conspiring to import cannabis.