Product Description

Born into the emerging middle classes of the 1950s, Billy Childish takes us on a nightmarish voyage through a childhood blighted by mental and sexual abuse. Stumbling onward into adolescence he lays bare a young man's desperate attempts to make sense of a world distorted by alcohol, bullies and yes men, This striking first novel, or 'creative confession', is at turns hilarious and harrowing. Laced with lindes of unforgettable peotry it is that rare and wonderful thing - a book which had to be written.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #337625 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"'A SEETHING, DYSLEXIC, BETTER LOOKING, BRITISH BUKOWSKI.' OBSERVER 'A cult-rock icon' John Peel 'Raw, unmediated, bruisingly shocking' Daily Telegraph 'A self-made intellectual of a particularly English stripe, Mr Childish has sworn loyalty to populist art at its rawest' New York Times 'Masterful stuff. He is the James Joyce of our time' Bevis Hillier"

Guardian
'Britain's greatest cultural asset'

Time Out
'Terse, gutsy and powerfully humane'

Customer Reviews

An open & very honest book that will make you laugh & cry.
Billy's classic 1st autobiograhical novel exposes his troubled childhood/adolescence in a frank & totally honest, yet brutal way. From the sexual abuse by a family friend as a child through to the day he beat his father up, this book is a compelling read & will make you laugh & cry in places.

The best English book written in the twentieth century.
My fault by Billy Childish is simply the best English noivel written in the twentieth century, the lyrical flow and honesty of the central character, narrator, is equal to both Allan Sillitoe's Saturday Night Sunday Morning and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. The book takes you through the childhood of a dyslexic, working class boy. The disfunction, disassociation and allienation of the character is perfectly caught, it comes across as a mixture between the childhood books of Jack Kerouac, his evocation of the Chatham of the seventies equal to Kerouac's Lowell and, inevitably with a novel about an adolescent boy, Catcher in The Rye. The other novel that it most resembled to me was Bukowski's childhood memoir/novel Ham on Rye. Childish is a better novelist than Bukowski and his political and moral force is harder. When a dopey lying book like The Strange Case of the Dog in the Night is being praised so widely a book like this that tells the truth about growing up needs to be read. If you haven't read this you don't know nothing about literature.