Ike Eze-anyika
Canteen Culture
Pbk published February 2000 by Faber at £9.99
ISBN: 0571200796Winner of the 1998 Saga Prize (for first novels by black British or irish writers), Canteen Culture is an uproarious exposure by a former policeman of what really goes on under the blue lamp.
Bubba, Jazz, Speedy, Lionel, Saddam and Sponge know every trick in the book. They hang out in seedy pubs, enjoy a good punch-up, and generally find themselves sleeping it off in the cells. lowlifes! Petty villains! No -just a group of police officers on one of London's least enviable beats.
They dream of winning the Lottery and leaving it all behind. But then a less legal way of making a fortune comes along, and the odds are better than fourteen million to one...
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Andrew Motion
Wainewright the Poisoner
Published February 2000 by Faber at £20.00
ISBN: 057119401X
A dazzling and boldly original biography by Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate and the celebrated biographer of Larkin and Keats.
Wainewright was an ingenious and unscrupulous criminal. In 1828 he inherited the handsome family
home, while successive legacies allowed him to maintain a flamboyant lifestyle. But, within the space of a few years, three of his relatives were to die in suspicious circumstances.
Eventually tried and arrested, Wainewright was transported for life to Tasmania. Yet he had lived at the centre of the Romantic world. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and painted Byron's portrait. He was good friends with Henry Fuseli, William Blake and Charles Lamb, and knew John Glare, William Hazlitt, Thomas de Quincey and John Keats. He was known as amiable, kind, and good-hearted.
Combining the form of a 'confession' with notes, asides and illuminations, Wainewright the Poisoner strips away the layers of legend and restores Wainewright to his own voice, capturing his dandified style, his charm as well as his callousness, his wit as well as his wantonness - and his deadly unreliability.
Andrew Motion is the author of several volumes of poetry, and of three previous biographies: The Lamberts, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life and Keats. In 1999 he was appointed Poet Laureate.
Acclaim for Keats:
'This portrait, stripped of its layers of varnish and restored to its glowing colours, should last us for another generation.' Edmund White, Observer
Acclaim for Philip Larkin:
'An exemplary biography of its kind detailed, meticulous and sympathetic.' Peter Ackroyd, The Times
