Bøker av Ken Champion

A collection of short stories describing working class life in London.

Then And Us demonstrates how Champion can produce a novel with a natural, very 'real' style, complementing the touchingly brave and awkward not-so-long-ago world of young adulthood battling their own and class-divided emotions. With its setting and tonal range reminding one of Waugh - at times an almost anti-Brideshead Revisited - the dialogue, setting, and characters are so well-placed in their time, and Champion's more usual ideological polemics are nicely tucked into the mouths of the pedagogues, leaving the characters to breath, and speak to us movingly.

'Ken Champion's Future Tense is a novel of ideas brought to life by a cast of characters struggling in a new world order where Equality under a neo-liberal regime has been codified to an authoritarian extreme in an Orwellian dystopia. Meanwhile, the true master - internationally conglomerate capitalism - lets the puppets tangle their own strings. Champion, ever the master of unappealing male protagonists, leaves room for doubt and a semblance of redemption even if the better times of childhood may be more false dawns. With a strong, contemporary premise taking head-on the prominent controversies of today, this book ought to come with some kind of health-warning.' Phillip Ruthen, Waterloo Press

'Ken Champion used to craft elegant narrative verse before turning his considerable talent to the prose form, effortlessly turning out the kind of clever, drily comic literary novels that tend to invite praise. Times change, however, and for his latest novel Champion has changed gear to accommodate the conspicuously angry mood of the moment. Further sharpening an increasingly political style, THE POLITICOS is his most engaged piece of writing yet; using a twin-track narrative to confront the major issues of the age, taking in class, ideology, immigration, identity and alienation. And as befits a seasoned portraitist of a changing London, he neatly captures the shifting landscape and language of the city he so clearly loves, embracing the personal as well as the political in an epic novel that makes us think, laugh, shout out loud and cry. Expect to be tantalised, teased, challenged; even shocked as Champion turns his withering gaze on troubled times.

Stories of London lives as seen through the eyes of psychologist James Kent

London psychoanalyst James Kent deals with a difficult case across three European capitals, London, Paris and Rome