The Hard Shoulder

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Description

O'Grady comes home from jail to Kilburn weathering the onset of a harsh new climate. This is Mrs Thatcher's Britain. It is a place he recognizes, but he feels lost in it. His estranged wife has moved on and up, out to the suburbs; the daughter he barely knew is living with a wealthy record producer. O'Grady lodges in his spinster sister's dreary hotel. Alcohol and the random chances it brings begin to define his life. The only people who want to know him are aware that he is owed money by those for whom he took the fall. They offer him schemes, fantasies: he is expected to perform some action that will change lives. But O'Grady cannot make a decision and cannot act. The Hard Shoulder is an evocation of the grey avenues and pubs of Irish London at its most hopeless, a semi-criminal milieu of the lost: north-west London has never been more convincingly portrayed. Using and undermining the conventions of the thriller, Petit has written a book that deserves to stand alongside the best that the city has inspired.

Reviews

The prose has an understated lilting beauty. The Hard Shoulder is a chill, crisp and eerie performance * Scotland on Sunday *
Chris Petit writes with confidence, inviting the reader to breathe the smoke and smell of stale beer in a marginal and hopeless world ... he writes to great effect of the anger and loneliness of a man adrift in a world he does not recognise * Times Literary Supplement *
A deliberately simple story of low-budget wheeling and dealing. An immaculately observed polythene-wrapped version of noir and a gently mocking anti-thriller that teases the conventions of the genre while deftly fulfilling our expectations * New Statesman *
As a thriller, this delivers on no uncertain terms; as a character study, it's even more acute * Crime Time UK *

Author Bio

Chris Petit is a novelist and film-maker. His work in film includes 'Radio On', 'Chinese Boxes' and (with Iain Sinclair) 'The Cardinal and the Corpse', 'The Falconer and Asylum' and a forthcoming film on the M25. His first novel Robinson is published by Granta Books. He has also written The Psalm Killer (1997) and Back From the Dead (1999). He lives in London.