Headhunters

Description

Headhunters is the story of five friends. Carter USM is a live wire who lives on the edge; Mango can't stop thinking; Harry is a beer-lover and dreamer; Balti his drinking partner, out of work and hoping for a fresh start; while Will is the quiet romantic, a voice of reason as the lives of the others become increasingly chaotic. It is also a story of London, rooted in the streets, workplaces, pubs and music - but a parallel society exists where the planet's wealthy can buy and sell whatever they like. Mixing humour and longing, Headhunters is brutal, honest and poetic.

John King's first book, The Football Factory, was an instant word-of-mouth success and was later turned into a high-profile film. Sales in the UK now top a quarter of a million copies. The novels Headhunters, England Away, Human Punk, White Trash, The Prison House, and Skinheads followed. He has long been associated with fanzines, writing for various titles over the years and running Two Sevens in the early 1990s. He currently publishes and edits Verbal, a fiction-based publication. Other interests include a regular Human Punk night at London's legendary 100 Club. He lives in London.

"John King is the authentic voice of contemporary London." --Michael Moorcock "Brutal, honest and poetic in the way that only a tough guy can be, King loads the gun and shoots us into the lager-filled, lust-fueled lives of five London lads. Headhunters is sexy, dirty, violent, sad and funny; in fact it has just about everything you could want from a book on contemporary working-class life in London." --Big Issue "King loads his characters up with enough interior life, but it's the raw energy of their interactions--the beano to Blackpool, the punch-ups, the casual fucks, the family skeletons and the unburied fantasies--that make this excellent book run." --Steve Grant, Time Out "Headhunters is an odyssey into southern English blue-collar manners as King deconstructs the stereotype of Essex Man and his outer London contemporaries and finds rather more complex attitudes towards gender and class than the tabloid image suggests." --Teddy Jamieson, The List "King's achievement since his debut has been enormous: creating a modern, proletarian English literature at once genuinely modern, genuinely proletarian, genuinely English and genuinely literature." --Charles Shaar Murray