Product Description

In the late 1990s, a group of young drifters find themselves together on the coast of Wales. They explore and attempt to overcome the yearnings and addictions that brought them this place, promiscuity, drugs, petty crime, the intense and angry search for the meaning which they feel life is lacking at the end of this momentous century.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59822 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
With such classics as Generation X and Trainspotting, notions of generational angst are still a fertile breeding ground of forceful expression for authors. Now we have Grits, a complex debut from Niall Griffiths, in which the lives of a group of disenfranchised loners are laid bare as they confront their own anger at society and the ruin it has made of their lives.

Set in the socially complex late 1990s, these drifters meet in a small coastal village in West Wales, brought there as they attempt to escape their various addictions (drugs, alcohol, crime, promiscuity) and find a place where they can dissect and extract meaning from their damaged lives. The setting of the novel is an intriguing premise in itself: an isolated village, wedged between two of natures more inhospitable locales, the sea and mountains. It is a cunning tool, reinforcing the trapped nature of these lives, no matter the reasons they ended up there. Equally successful is Griffith's use of language: each of the characters narrative is written in a "phonetic" style, which allows their personalities and emotions to erupt from the page:

Evil is not an amorphous, anonymous fing; it has a house an a family, it eats breakfast, it wears certain clowthes an squirms tentacles in ta every aspect av ya life. It will neva give in ... Right now, someone is lacing up their polished black shoes and double-checking your address. Run.

It makes it hard-going but perseverance yields effective results. Though it lacks the full-on deviant humour of Trainspotting, Grits certainly shares that book's incisive and gritty glimpse into a potent underclass who have willingly embraced an ideology of disenchantment, expressed through petty addictions and fuelled by relentless anger. An exciting debut that will appeal to the legions of people who feel such pain to whatever degree. --Danny Graydon

About the Author
Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He is the author of six novels: Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor, Stump, Wreckage, and Runt.

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Customer Reviews

Leaping off the page
This is the best book I've read - by a mile - for absolutely ages, maybe years.
It helps if you've actually heard the regional accents that inform the phonetic style of the writing before (there's a Liverpudlian, a girl from Yorkshire, an Essex boy and a few Welsh characters, so I imagine, say, an American reader would find it really hard going) - but if you have, you'll crack through the different snapshot-stories as if it were your own inner monologue you were listening to. The characters really do LEAP off the page at you, too - what makes the book so powerful is that you can begin to accept their motivations just the way they explain them to themselves, until you glimpse the same events from another point of view.
It's not all grit and grime, either, and even the worst folk in the story sometimes have a warmth to them. Disco-ball flicking from one scene to the next weaves each character's story tightly to the others.
I can't recommend it enough.

Thats Life!
Quite simply an amazing feat of literature. Sums up the angst and the desires and fears that characterise the forgotten people of society - the people that actually live life, those who are forced to deal with the very worst, but also the most real aspects of a system devoid of compassion and filled with hate. It is a glimspe into the world that intermingles with that of the priviliged people but is never seen. An eye opening and ultimately life affirming novel. And as an aber local, it makes it even more real...

Book of the year
What a great book - great characters, great prose, and a realistic take on life in the aber area. Makes trainspotting appear limp in comparison. His writing on taking drugs is frighteningly accurate, look forward to his next book.