Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
funny
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
dark
funny
informative
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
This isn’t the Kent of oast houses and cherry trees. Seabrook takes us to some of the less loved parts of the county in a discursive reflection that takes in Dickens, Richard Dadd, TS Eliot, John Buchan, William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), Freddie Mills and Charles Hawtrey. I love both the way he saw and the way he wrote. Seabrook seems to revel in the strangeness of the everyday. Recommended for lovers of WG Sebald, Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades.
Strange and wonderful, I am so glad I discovered this through the backlisted podcast.
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
funny
informative
medium-paced
This book is marginally less about Kent than 'The Rings of Saturn' is about East Anglia. I enjoyed it for the most part but he is no Sebald. He writes like Iain Sinclair, making obscure references of the 'If You Know You Know' kind. But whereas Sinclair leaves them unexplained, Seabrook breaks them as the punchline.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Homophobia, Pedophilia, Murder
A non-fiction stream of consciousness narrative about the horrors hidden in the history of Kent. Without judgement, and probably a lot of alcohol, the writer touches upon some pretty uncomfortable topics including murder, bigotry, Nazism and pedophillia. At points it was a compelling read with puddles of atmospheric description; at times it was journalistic and inquisitive, but sadly the vast majority of this book is bad exposition where the reader is needlessly confused because the author mixes the tales together and fails to tell you for literally pages what or who he is now talking about. I guess you might like that, I felt it was infuriating.
Astonishing - ostensibly a nimble travelogue/ psychogeographical jaunt around the Kent coast, but really a dizzying excuse for Seabrook to join several dots to create a sort of parallel history of 20th century Britain. We get true crime; Carry On films; Performance and The Servant; John Buchan; Oswald Mosley and Lord Haw Haw; Charles Hamilton; T S Eliot; Freddie Mills; Somerset Maugham; Dickens and Collins and so much more. The best of it is that Seabrook has this extraordinary ability to combine brilliant ideas into a greater whole, to push them into a shape you only really see looming as they all come together. Some of it may seem a reach when you think about it afterwards, but while you’re reading it everything feels important and vital and part of wider, murkier whole. An extraordinary book