Product Description

Tragic and hilarious in equal measure, Tim Lott’s story of Charlie and Maureen Buck’s ailing marriage and their climb up (and down) the social ladder during the 1980s is a wonderfully honest portrait of ordinary people living through an extraordinary time. Steeped in the decade’s cataclysmic events, packed with the crimes and misdemeanours we visit on each another, ‘Rumours of a Hurricane’ is a powerful tale of change, how we face it – and how we don’t. ‘An outstanding comic novel. Places the 1980s under sceptical and merciless scrutiny’ Literary Review.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66654 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The death of homeless man Charlie Buck is unremarkable to everyone except the few passers-by who witness his drunken--and apparently voluntary--fall beneath a speeding lorry. No loved ones or friends attend his last breaths in hospital--his possessions amount to a National Insurance card, a digital watch and a newspaper obituary for a dead composer. But Charlie was a person. He had a wife and a son, his own set of dreams and personal demons, a biography no more and no less studded with dramas, defeats and victories than anyone else’s.

This is the mission of Rumours of a Hurricane, Tim Lott’s second novel: to chart the life of a single man, revealing it to be remarkable in its ordinariness and epic within its narrow confines. The backdrop to Charlie’s tragic saga is the relentlessly changing Britain of the 1980s, a nation twisted by greed and discontent. History weaves gracefully in and out of the tale, its hero riding high as he buys his own council flat and invests in the stock market; laid low as the great storms and the recession hit his home and his business. But Lott’s grasp of the recent past is by no means his most impressive talent--what dazzles on every page is his powerful grasp of the human soul and his ability to turn harsh truths into some truly fascinating fiction. Like Lott’s first novel White City Blue, this is an uncompromising book, one whose messages we ignore at our peril. --Matthew Baylis

Review
By the author of White City Blue, winner of the 1999 Whitbread First Novel Award. A man teeters drunk on the edge of the pavement and takes a deep draught from a can clutched in his hand. He is hit by a lorry, badly injured and rushed to hospital. His National Insurance card identifies him as Charles William Buck and he has on him a newspaper cutting about the musician Mantovani headed 'Goodbye Mr Music'. Once Buck had been somebody with a wife, home and son. Now all is gone. The story moves back to 1979 when Margaret Thatcher came to power. It is a novel about one rather ordinary man and his life in the 1980s. It's about power, money and families and Tim Lott turns this ordinary man's life into a powerful and cleverly woven tale.

It's 1991. Maureen seems self-assured and successful; Charlie, her ex-husband, is a drunken down-and-out, dying in hospital. What happened to them? Tim Lott's novel is a tragi-comic cautionary tale about two ordinary people during a far from ordinary decade, the 1980s. When Margaret Thatcher first comes to power in 1979, people still eat Spam and Smash, there are strict demarcation lines between union and management, husbands and wives, and there is a passive acceptance of the unchanging nature of the world, with jobs for life and the way things are done completely taken for granted. Charlie, a compositor with The Times, regards his strike at the end of the '70s as a totally justified stand of craftsmen against an unfair management, which he fully expects will cave in as usual, whereas the dustmen's strike seems to him to be irresponsible and greedy. He is the wage earner; his wife Maureen is the housewife, keeping things going in their council flat. Even now, though, there are hints of stresses within their relationship, which will fracture completely under the extreme pressures of the boom-and-bust era. Charlie, never the most analytical of men, has to face the results of a combination of bad luck and bad choices; Maureen has to carve out her own methods of surviving. What will happen to their certainties? How do their relationships change? Tim Lott skilfully depicts their vulnerability and the sheer excess and greed of the time. The period is extraordinarily well observed, from the smallest detail of decor and manners to the horrific events in Wapping, and the tale is well-constructed, readable and poignant. The hurricane of the title is not just that of 1987 but the elemental forces of the '80s that eliminated a whole way of life. (Kirkus UK)

About the Author
Tim Lott's previous books are The Scent of Dried Roses, which was awarded the jR Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, and White City Blue which won the Whitbread first novel award. Tim Lott lives in London NW10.