Bageye at the Wheel A 1970S Childhood in Suburbia

Paperback (04 Apr 2013)

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Publisher's Synopsis

A powerful prescient memoir of life in 1970s Britain for a child of Windrush generation parents.

'This book is a classic' Sunday Telegraph


To his fellow West Indians who assemble every weekend for the all-night poker game at Mrs Knight's, he is always known as Bageye. There aren't very many black men in Luton in 1972 and most of them gather there: Summer Wear, Pioneer, Anxious, Tidy Boots - each has his nickname. Bageye already finds it a struggle to feed his family on his wage from Vauxhall Motors, but now his wife Blossom has set her heart on her sons going to private school and she will not settle for anything less.

This is the story of a father seen through the eyes of his ten-year-old son. It's a wry and gentle comedy about unfulfilling day jobs and late night poker games, of illegal mini-cabs and small-scale drug-dealing.
And it is also about a family struggling to belong in post-Windrush Britain and growing up in a vanished world of 1970s suburbia.

LOOK OUT FOR COLIN GRANT'S NEW BOOK: Homecoming - the first oral history of the Windrush generation

About the Publisher

Vintage

Vintage

Vintage is a highly respected paperback publisher of contemporary fiction and non-fiction, publishing writers like Philip Roth, Martin Amis and Toni Morrison. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list such as Kingsley Amis, A S Byatt, J M Coetzee, Ismail Kadare, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Anne Enright, Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle and Ben Okri, to name a few.

Book information

ISBN: 9780099552390
Publisher: Random House
Imprint: Vintage
Pub date:
DEWEY: 942.5670857092
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 280
Weight: 208g
Height: 198mm
Width: 130mm
Spine width: 19mm