Trapped Life

A searing, urgent account of the lives too often reduced to headlines. In TRAPPED LIFE, Reid captures the mandem with rare honesty and authority, illuminating urban estate life and beyond with compassion, fury and fierce intelligence. This is not just a book - it’s a necessary reckoning. – Scorcher
Dr Reid’s urgent and reverting narrative is a generous guide through the joys, pains and shared trauma of Northville. Using compelling individual trajectories, Reid provides the reader with the tools to move away from shallow views about Black British culture and youth criminality. Both intimate and extremely well researched, Trapped Life is an exploration of violence and care as survival strategies against distress and society’s neglect. This book will fundamentally alter your mindset. There is no going back for peopledem after reading Trapped Life. – Olivette Otele, author or African Europeans: An Untold History
This is a vital contribution to the national conversation about urban violence. Ebony Reid untangles the terrible logic that leads young men to risk their lives in the drug economy. With a novelist’s compassion and a scientist’s rigour, she takes us beyond the stereotypes to depict her characters’ lives in all their pathos and tragedy – Marcel Theroux
In a profound and timely narrative, Reid takes us beyond routine understanding of a place and its people. Trapped Life lays bare the challenges of the inner city environment and offers a valuable new perspective, as well as an ‘up close’ analysis of the truly human effects of street violence. – Dr Joy White
A stirring meditation on the vitality and plurality of life on this London estate. Reid has found a way to bear witness to the beauty, detail and intimacy in each individual story up-close… I loved this book. – Anna Whitwham
This book offers unrivalled insight into the joys and pains of life on Britain’s socio-economic periphery. Anyone looking for an understanding of urban violence, and the kinds of wisdom that might one day work to prevent it would do well to start their reading here. – Jonathan Ilan
Fast paced, gripping, thoughtful and caring: the tale of one of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods, as seen from the inside. – Danny Dorling
God bless the writers weaving tragic, hilarious, complex and magical tales of lives often demonised. Trapped Life is a searing and tender recollection of tangled roots, survival and community, sprinkled with joy. ­­­­­­­­­ – Jade LB, author of Keisha the Sket

Ebony Reid is a criminologist and ethnographer who specialises in researching street crime and violence in inner-city London. Having grown up on an estate in London, she dedicates her academic teaching and research to examining the cycles of poverty, psychosocial factors, and the related violence that frequently underpin ‘Trap Life’. Trap Life is her first book.

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