These Wild English: A family, a class, a country on fire

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‘An unforgettable and moving portrait of working-class alienation’ JAMES REBANKS’Utterly compelling’ REBECCA SMITH’Wonderful … I was immersed in it’ MELVYN BRAGG’Tender and raw, angry and elegiac, deeply personal and profoundly political. It gets closer to the truth than much of what has been written on the issue’ OBSERVERA BOOKSELLER BOOK OF THE MONTH —I’m England till I die. I know I am, I’m sure I am, I’m England till I die!Mum’s marching through towns yelling slogans with the EDL. Billy’s in prison for armed robbery. And Nicola’s left holding the family photos, asking: how did we get here?These Wild English follows three generations of a working-class family as they struggle with the forces reshaping modern Britain. Nicola’s mum grew up on a farm with seven siblings, part of a family the police knew well and the pubs knew better. But that landscape and community is long gone. As she navigates low-paid work and stormy marriages against a constant hum of economic decline, Mum begins looking for a new source of belonging. And the appeal of the far right will have consequences that stretch far beyond her family. From the working farms of Cumbria to the windswept shores of Kent, via bleak barracks in Cyprus and Northern Ireland, this is a rare and tender reckoning with the love, rage, pride and loss of a community and a country. It will change how you see the divisions of our age.