Paperback 6" x 9" 150 pages ISBN 978-1-326-28512-8
Published June 2015
This is
a splendid novel of the London Blitz that captures life mostly
through the eyes of a bright and creative working class boy.
Keith’s knowledge of what’s going on is limited, but his experience
leads us deep into a time and place – and the lives of ordinary
people – with more power than any history book could convey.
Meredith Sue Willis
(’15)
After his widely acclaimed novella, The
Dramaturgical Metaphor, an existential thriller which sees
psychoanalyst James Kent embark on a dark and disturbing European
journey, Champion’s new offering, Keefie, occupies very
different territory.
Opening amongst the narrow, grimy,
tree-free streets of 1930s East London where his titular hero is
growing up and making sense of his world in the run-up to war,
Champion brilliantly captures the claustrophobic life of work,
traditional gender roles and family amongst the white working class
that once dominated these neighbourhoods, deploying his mastery of
conversation to powerful effect as he anatomises the rules,
restrictions and unspoken resentments that define a tightly bounded,
long lost world.
A second narrative, initially located in
New York, collides with the first in rural East Anglia which sees a
blue collar lecturer on an intellectual journey that probes identity
and the inherent contradictions between nature and nurture.
Once again, Champion has produced a clever
novel that is both distinctive and profoundly unsettling, exposing
the emotional emptiness of both the superficially cheery cockney
culture and the loquacious, self- regarding grove of academe. There
may be an overwhelming sadness at the core of the story, yet there’s
also something decidedly beautiful about the way it is told; shining
the tiniest flicker of light into the author’s bomb-ravaged wartime
landscape.
Chris Connelley, Hastings Independent Press
(’15)
Ken Champion is an internationally published
writer, novelist and poet whose work has appeared in literary
journals in the US and extensively in magazines and anthologies in
the UK.
A volume of short stories, Urban Narratives
(2013), a novel, The Dramaturgical Metaphor (2014) and a
collection of poetry, Cameo Metro (2014) have been published
by Penniless Press Publications. A pamphlet, African Time
(2002), chapbook, Cameo Poly (2004) and a first collection,
But Black and White Is Better (2008, reprinted
2010) are published by Tall Lighthouse. He is a
South Magazine Profiled Poet and a reviewer.
A selection of his poems and fiction can be
found at The Poetry Library and at
www.kenchampion.org.uk
Ken lectures in sociology and lives in London.
