Never before published in the U.S., GB84 will be launched in 2014 alongside two other novels by David Peace: The Damned Utd and Red or Dead In taut and gripping prose that often feels like the relentless text of a surveillance report, GB84 tells the story of the British coal miner’s strike of 1984—including the actual bombings, riots and protests that brought the country to the brink of civil war. Called by its author “fiction based on fact,” the book depicts a real-life 1984 more violently dystopian than even Orwell imagined. Slowly starving strikers find themselves pitted against a prime minister—Margaret Thatcher—determined to crush them . . . a police force willing to use infiltration and violence to achieve her will . . . and equally hungry scabs who need a job . . . Mixing real events and characters with the voices of the increasingly desperate strikers, the book becomes a stirring saga of courage against overwhelmingly sinister forces, and paints a searing and haunting portrait of events that changed the course of British history.

A New York Times Editors' Choice "[T]he stuff of great literature." —The New York Times | "Red or Dead is a winner." —The Washington Post The place where the swinging sixties started – Liverpool, England, birthplace of the Beatles – wasn’t so swinging. Amid industrial blight and a bad economy, the port town’s shipping industry was going bust and there was widespread unemployment, with no assistance from a government tightening its belt. Even the Beatles moved to London. Into these hard times walked Bill Shankly, a former Scottish coal miner who took over the city’s perpetually last-place soccer team. He had a straightforward work ethic and a favorite song – a silly pop song done by a local band, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Soon he would have entire stadiums singing along, tens of thousands of people all dressed in the team color red . . . as Liverpool began to win . . . And soon, too, there was something else those thousands of people would chant as one: Shank-lee, Shank-lee . . . In Red or Dead, the acclaimed writer David Peace tells the stirring story of the real-life working-class hero who lifted the spirits of an entire city in turbulent times. But Red or Dead is more than a fictional biography of a real man, and more than a thrilling novel about sports. It is an epic novel that transcends those categories, until there’s nothing left to call it but – as many of the world’s leading newspapers already have – a masterpiece.

The contemporary moment is characterized by precarity – an expanding and intensifying vulnerability conditioned by political and economic structures. Using literary and cultural texts to develop a nuanced and critical exploration of the concept of precarity that emphasizes its contemporary manifestations while also attending to its historical roots and existential dimensions, this book examines the vulnerabilities which characterize our anxious existence, including unemployment, environmental crisis, temporary contracts and patterns of migration. Broken down into three key themes of feelings, bodies and time, Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture asks whether precarity can be considered a new phenomenon; explores the relationship between precarity and traditional class politics; analyses precarity's global dimensions; and reflects on the links between contemporary crisis and underlying existential human vulnerability. With reference to a wide range of forms such as contemporary, realist, science fiction and modernist novels, film, theatre, and the lyric poem, this book goes beyond one national context to consider texts from the US, UK, Germany and South Africa.

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction looks at how the twenty-first-century British novel has explored contemporary working-class life. Studying the works of David Peace, Gordon Burn, Anthony Cartwright, Ross Raisin, Jenni Fagan, and Sunjeev Sahota, the book shows how they have mapped the shift from deindustrialisation through to stigmatization of individuals and communities who have experienced profound levels of destabilization and unemployment. O'Brien argues that these novels offer ways of understanding fundamental aspects of contemporary capitalism for the working class in modern Britain, including, class struggle, inequality, trauma, social abjection, racism, and stigmatization, exclusively looking at British working-class literature of the twenty-first century.

David Peace is an emerging author who is widely read and taught, and whose novels are increasingly translated into commercial film (The Damned United, March 2009) and television (Channel 4 adaptation of the Red Riding Quartet, March 2009). Dr Katy Shaw's book provides a challenging but accessible critical introduction to his work through a detailed analysis of his writing, as well as the socio-cultural contexts of its production and dissemination. The author explores Peace's attempts to capture the sensibilities of late twentieth century society and contributes to an ongoing debate in the media about Peace's representations. Influenced by critical theory, the text will be the first secondary resource concerning this rising star of contemporary British literature. While UK readers will seek insight into the socio-cultural contexts of England's regions (and in particular his writing on the Yorkshire Ripper and the 1985 -- 5 miners' strike), Peace also has a following in the US where both The Damned United and Red Riding are set to receive a national cinema release in 2009/10. This broad international appeal and readership will be explored and discussed, especially in the context of crime fiction and social engagement. This text is the first critical resource concerning this author and will cover the full body of Peace's writings to date, the debates this work has generated, and the often contentious representations offered by his novels.

Gran Bretaña, 1984. El anuncio del cierre de las minas de carbón desencadena la mayor huelga de la historia británica. Durante un año, el todopoderoso Sindicato Nacional de Mineros mantendrá un pulso con el gobierno de Margaret Thatcher, quien decide tratar a los huelguistas como "the enemy within". El Judío, un oscuro ejecutivo de los servicios secretos, será la persona elegida por la primera ministra para aplastar al movimiento obrero; enfrente tendrá al carismático líder minero Arthur Scargill, el Rey Carbón, y a sus lugartenientes. Con un país en pie de guerra, ¿hasta dónde estará dispuesto a llegar un gobierno para machacar a su enemigo interno? "Peace ha convertido la épica de la gran huelga minera en un apasionante thriller, sin detrimento del realismo documental". Terry Eagleton, The Guardian "La novela de David Peace sobre la última guerra civil inglesa es un análisis emocionante de un choque titánico". Euan Ferguson, The Guardian "Un 1984 más grotesco aún que el de Orwell". Sukhdev Sandhu, The Telegraph "Gótico político". Andy Beckett, London Review of Books "El relato "oculto" de las 53 semanas de brutal confrontación política, social e ideológica convierte a GB84 en una novela enormemente significativa". Alex Clark, The Times

Immigrant Fictions is a groundbreaking collection that brings together studies of world literature, book history, narrative theory, and the contemporary novel to challenge methods of critical reading based on national models of literary culture. Contributors suggest that contemporary novels by immigrant writers need to be read across several geographies of production, circulation, and translation. Analyzing work by David Peace, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Iva Pekarkova, Yan Geling, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Anchee Min, and Monica Ali, these essays take up a range of critical topics, including the transnational book and the migrant writer, the comparative reception history of postcolonial fiction, transnational criticism and Asian-American literature in the U. S., mobility and feminism in translation, linguistic mediation and immigrating fictions, migration and the politics of narrative form.