Clockwork Books
Clockwork Books publishes for an African audience first, but we believe that our stories resonate with readers further afield. We would especially like to find new global audiences for our titles.
View Rights PortalClockwork Books publishes for an African audience first, but we believe that our stories resonate with readers further afield. We would especially like to find new global audiences for our titles.
View Rights PortalIn the decades following the Second World War, youthful sociability was remade as young people across Britain flocked to newly-opened coffee bars, beat clubs, and discos. These spaces, increasingly unknown and unfamiliar to the adults who passed by them, played a remarkable role in reshaping town and city centres after dark as sites of leisure and recreation. Telling the history of youth in post-war Britain from the ground up, through the towns and cities that young people moved through, this book traces how the new spaces of post-war youth leisure transformed both young people's relationship with their local environment and adults' perceptions of the possibilities and dangers of modern leisure. Growing up and going out offers a timely study of youth, commerce, and leisure that explores the reimagination, remaking, and regulation of the post-war city after dark.
We moderns were the inhabitants of an age of impetuous forward movement and voracious discontent. Our main virtue was to increase our reach. Increasing our having and accelerating our being were the signposts towards the future. We just could not get enough. Using the blinkers of ignorance and self-anaesthesia, however, we managed to forget the tremendous costs incurred by this intoxication. Now disillusionment has set in. We look to the future with anxiety. We know that we have long since crossed a line and that a revision of our lifestyle is imminent. We have a bad feeling, and doubts about progress often give way to anger and rebellion. Which stocks of the modern narrative should we defend; which would we do better to let go? How will we even "be able to stop"? The path to a different society needs an attractive goal, because without the prospect of a different, better life, we will not move forward. We should start practising immediately. There is no time to lose.
This novel is one of Anthony Burgess's most accessible and entertaining works. By turns bawdy, raucous, tender and bittersweet, and full of music and songs, this is a warm and affectionate portrait of the working-class Lancashire of the 1920s and 1930s that he knew from his own early life. The Pianoplayers is a funny, moving, autobiographical novel that brings to life the world of silent cinemas and music-halls of 1920s Manchester and Blackpool. Fully annotated and with a new introduction, this is an authoritative text for a new generation of readers. Part of the forthcoming Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, this book offers an opportunity to reappraise an unjustly neglected novel important to our understanding of Burgess's wider oeuvre. The 2017 Burgess centenary makes this a key moment for reflection on the life and work of a major figure in twentieth century letters.