White Riot

Stylish and pacy, White Riot throbs with a restless, punky energy, bringing Hackney of the late 70s and early 80s compellingly and disturbingly to life. A full-throated, swaggering roar of a book – Lucy CaldwellWhite Riot is an electrifying novel of politics, the counterculture, and music as a powerful force. In Suzi Scialfa, Thomas has given us a pioneering character - a female journalist, forging her way in a man’s world; you believe in her, root for her, want to hear more. I loved this book – Laura BartonPolice and thieves, punks and spycops. White Riot captures the raw energy of the times in spectacular fashion, evoking a visceral narrative of power and corruption – Jake ArnottJoe Thomas takes on the inflammable end of the Seventies, when Rock Against Racism took the National Front head on and Margaret Thatcher turned the Winter of Discontent into her own Springtime … Like Daniel Rachel’s Walls Come Tumbling Down meets David Peace’s GB84 in a dark labyrinth of bent coppers, sleeping policemen, political polarity and the greatest sounds of the dirtiest decade – Cathi UnsworthThis book does not mess about. Punchy pithy prose page to page. Thrilling, entertaining, expertly crafted - a winner in every way. Loved it – Ashley Hickson-LovenceEnthralling – John Dugdale * Sunday Times *Gripping … Deeply moving … A love letter to London, seething with outrage, that leads you keen to read its planned sequels – Mark Sanderson * The Times *A propulsive crime novel. Thomas ably captures local community anger, interracial tensions and especially the foreboding atmosphere … This ambitious work on a big canvas is an admirable attempt at portraying a fraught and fracturing nation * Guardian *Captures the searing energy and polarised nature of the capital in the late 1970s and early 1980s … Thomas creates a potent drama from the counterculture of a period when Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League were battling prejudice. White Riot adroitly blends fact and fiction. – Martin Chilton * Independent *With real life and fictional characters rubbing shoulders in a turbo-charged and multi-layered narrative, this is truly a State of Britain thriller … A genuine, undiluted ‘punk’ epic, with a ready-made soundtrack and I can’t wait for the next instalment – Maxim Jakubowski * Crime Time *A timely, powerful and gorgeously readable novel that represents everything that is good and important about the crime fiction genre – Declan Burke * Irish Times *Joe Thomas brilliantly recaptures an ugly episode in our recent past. Lest we forget… – Val McDermid

JOE THOMAS was born in Hackney in 1977. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Sao Paulo quartet - Paradise City, Gringa, Playboy, and Brazilian Psycho - and Bent, which was a Guardian Best Book of 2020 and an Irish Times pick of the best crime fiction of 2020. His new novel, White Riot, the start of a trilogy set in Hackney in the 1970s and 1980s, is to be published by Arcadia in January 2023, and will be followed by Red Menace and True Blue. Joe lives in London with his partner and son, and teaches at City, University of London.

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