Editorial Reviews
Book Description
A succ's de scandale when it was published in England in 1963, Up the Junction is a high-voltage, gorgeously visceral collection of portraits of working-class women's lives, finally restored to print
Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In the space of 120 perfect pages, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry. Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful and timeless testimonial to it.
About the Author
When in her middle twenties, Nell Dunn, an "heiress from Chelsea" with a background in journalism, intended to do a little behind-the-scenes reportage in Battersea. The result, Up the Junction, went on to win the 1963 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and has sold more than 450,000 copies.
Up the Junction,Nell Dunn,Susan Benson,Counterpoint Press,1582430667,Dunn, Nell - Prose & Criticism,Fiction,Fiction - General,General,Literary,London (England),Working class women
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