Format: Paperback

Condition: New

Product dimensions: 352 pages, 8.26 X 5.83 X 0.85

Publishing Info: Faber & Faber Agency, 2017

Language: English

ISBN - 13: 9780571330836

 

Available via my network of independent booksellers at Biblio

 

An Hallucinated Oral History Of The Post-punk Music Scene In Airdrie, Coatbridge And Environs 1978

 

Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2017
One of The Telegraph's Best Books of 2017
Rought Trade Book of the Month
LRB Book of the Week
Caught By the River Book of the Month

'Beautifully believable and appallingly sad ... One of the most acute, affecting and aphoristic novels of recent years ... A hallucinatory and haunting vision.' (The Guardian)

This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock.

 

It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends.

 

Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos, and tender poignancy.

 

About the Author:

n/a

 

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Available via my network of independent booksellers at Biblio