Kung Fu

Description

Youth, love and violence collide in this enthralling, hard-hitting novel by Ryan Gattis, author of All Involved. "It's so tense that at times you have absolutely no idea what has just happened in the real world because you're in The Fu, entirely. You feel every blow, every break. And what a climax ..." Independent on Sunday Jen B's been surviving at the nightmarishly brutal MLK High School just like everybody else: by following the rules. She avoids the Principal. She doesn't complain. She's loyal to her MLK 'family'. And, like 99.5% of the student body, she knows one form or another of martial arts. When Jen's world-famous Kung-Fu champion of a cousin Jimmy Chang turns up, everyone wants a piece of him - including Ridley, resident drug lord and leader of the school's most violent gang. They all want to see the legendary martial-arts master defend himself during the school's merciless initiation ritual. Except that Jimmy's made a promise never to fight again - a promise that soon leads to the murder of Jen's brother and a bloody final battle that engulfs the entire school. Fast-paced, gritty and addictive, Kung Fu is an extreme journey into high-school violence and the American Dream that feeds it. PRAISE FOR ALL INVOLVED "A high-octane speedball of a read: gritty, nerve-racking, sometimes excruciating in its violence and at the same time animated by a bone-deep understanding of its characters' daily lives." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "Simultaneously empathetic and unsparing" New Yorker "A tour de force . . . without glamorising his subject, there's a lyricism in the vernacular and street language that makes it hard not to be moved . . . a powerful work of fiction" GQ "The Wire meets Quentin Tarantino on the set of 24 ... All Involved offers that most difficult and nebulous thing in fiction: it reads true." Financial Times "Audacious, unflinching and subversive ... It swallowed me whole." David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks

Ryan Gattis is a novelist, lecturer at Chapman University in Southern California, and member of LA urban art crew UGLAR.

It's so tense that at times you have absolutely no idea what has just happened in the real world because you're in The Fu, entirely. You feel every blow, every break. And what a climax . . . I want to tell you all about it so that I can discuss with you how wonderful, tragic and ultimately cathartic it was . . . but I won't. You'll just have to keep a strong stomach and see for yourself * Independent on Sunday * Ryan Gattis's homage to the world of martial arts is a way-cool, direct and stylish romp of fiction that feels very real . . . A modern, violent epic of teenage kicks in the school of hard knocks. Kung Fu is a bloodied white-knuckle ride that never forgets the consequences of its actions * The List *