Grits

(Paperback)

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Description

Dubbed 'the Welsh Irvine Welsh', Griffiths offers a brilliant, scintillating tale of 1990s drug culture and social decay in a small Welsh coastal town. In the late 1990s, a group of young drifters from various parts of Britain find themselves washed up together in a small town on the west coast of Wales, fixed between mountains and sea. Here, they both explore and attempt to overcome those yearnings and addictions which have brought them to this place- promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, petty crime, the intense and angry search for the meaning which they feel life lacks at the arse-end of this momentous century. A novel about the dispossessed and disenfranchised, about people with no further to fall, Grits is also resolutely about the spirit of the individual, and each character's story is told in their own rich, powerful dialect. Through their voices, the novel charts this chapter in their lives, presenting, with humour and rage and a deep underlying sadness, a picture of the diversity and waste that is life in Britain today.A work of power, passion and enormous originality, Grits describes - in language both mythic and demotic - ways of living that appear squalid but which aspire to the spiritual. As a novel that speaks for an under-class and a sub-culture, it stands comparison with Cain's Book and Trainspotting.

Reviews

An astonishing feat -- pulsing on every page with the unmistakable brilliance, authenticity and spirit of a magnificently gifted writer. * Irvine Welsh *
Any fan of "Trainspotting" will find "Grits" persuasive, alarming and addictive. * The Times *

Author Bio

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He is the author of six novels- Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor, Stump, Wreckage, and Runt.