White City with Dominic Nolan
Thu 07 Nov 2024
7:00pm at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, 14-15 John St, Bath, BA1 2JL
Book + Ticket gives you a free ticket with a copy of the book, all tickets include 15% off any books purchased on the night, author talk, Q&A and signing.
Other ways to book:
Email books@mrbsemporium.com, call 01225 331155 or pop into the shop at 14-15 John Street, Bath. BA1 2JL.
We are incredibly excited to welcome Dominic Nolan, one of the UK’s top crime writers and author of Vine Street – one of Mr B’s biggest ever selling books – to the shop to discuss his new novel, White City.
Vine Street, a British noir like no other, wowed staff and customers alike at Mr B’s, and became a runaway bestseller. Now Dominic returns with White City, where we are transported to 1950s London, a city still recovering from the brutal realities of war. Onto these gritty streets steps Clare Martin, a mother trying to keep her son from the jaws of gangsters, while also investigating her husband’s disappearance. Meanwhile Addie Rowe, daughter of a missing Jamaican postman, struggles to keep her sister safe in Brixton. Both will become intwined in a web of crime in this brilliant and gritty tale of race, violence and corruption.
White City is another triumph of storytelling and incredible sense-of-place, and we can’t wait to hear more about it!
About the book:
It’s 1952, and London is victorious but broken, a city of war ruins and rationing, run by gangsters and black-market spivs. An elaborate midnight heist, the biggest robbery in British history, sends newspapers into a frenzy.
Politicians are furious, the police red-faced. They have suspicions but no leads. Hunches but no proof.
For two families, it is more than just a sensational headline, as their fathers fail to return home on the day of the robbery. Young Addie Rowe, daughter of a missing Jamaican postman and drunk ex-club hostess mother, struggles to care for her little sister in a dilapidated Brixton rooming house. Claire Martin, increasingly resentful of roads not taken, strives to make the rent and keep her teenage son Ray from falling under unsavoury influences in Notting Dale.
She finds herself caught between the interests of dangerous men who may know the truth behind her husband’s disappearance: Dave Lander, whose reserved nature she finds difficult to reconcile with his reputation as a violent gang enforcer, and Teddy ‘Mother’ Nunn, a sociopathic, evangelising outlaw and top lieutenant in Billy Hill’s underworld. Drawn together through the years in the city’s invisible web of crime and poverty, the fates of the broken families and violent men collide in 1958, as the West Indian community of Notting Hill’s slums come under attack from thugs and Teddy Boys. For Addie, Claire, Dave and Mother, old scores will be settled and new dreams chased in the crucible of London’s violent summer.
‘I very much doubt I’ll read a better crime novel this year’ IAN RANKIN
‘Dominic Nolan is a wonderful writer’ CHRIS WHITAKER