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A searing story of teenage gangs, dead end towns and the shifting threat of latent violence, The Young Team is as visceral and important as fiction gets.
Azzy Williams is ready. Ready to smoke, pop pills, drink wine and ready to fight. But most of all, he's ready to do anything for his friends, his gang, his young team.
Round here, in the schemes of the forgotten industrial heartland of Scotland, your mates, your young team - they're everything.
Azzy Williams is fourteen; a rising star, this is his life and he loves it.
Azzy Williams is seventeen; he's out of control.
Azzy Williams is twenty-one; he'd like to leave it all behind.
But a way out isn't easy to find . . .
Inspired by the experiences of its author, Graeme Armstrong, The Young Team is an energetic novel, full of the loyalty, laughs, mischief, boredom, violence and threat of life on these streets. It looks beyond the tabloid stereotypes to tell a powerful story about the realities of life for young people in Britain today.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781529017366
Number of pages: 400
Weight: 286 g
Dimensions: 197 x 130 x 27 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Raw and lyrical . . . written in a voice that recalls Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner - dialect that fizzes off the page.' - The Observer
'The Young Team is a book full of guts, power, humour and humanity. This is a community not often seen in literature, depicted by a talented writer who intimately knows that world and the truth of this is seared in every sentence.' - Kerry Hudson, author of Lowborn
'Graeme Armstrong's debut novel is an instant Scottish classic.' - The Skinny
'Vivid, dynamic and sharp as a whip.' - Janice Galloway, author of The Trick is to Keep Breathing
'Phenomenal. It's been ages since I read a book so funny, visceral, or powerful.' - David Whitehouse, author of Bed and The Long Forgotten
'It is Trainspotting meets Clockwork Orange in this depiction of gang life in North Lanarkshire . . . it gives us a voice from a place - geographically and socio-economically - we don't often hear from, and that's valuable . . . it also offers us growth and change, even optimism for the future, in Azzy's story. -- John Self.' - The Times
'[A] gripping debut novel . . . [Armstrong] is quite a phenomenon . . . one of the most admired young voices in British fiction.' - Mike Wade, The Times
'Armstrong's hard-hitting novel is Trainspotting for a new generation, as the author draws on his own experiences to tell the coming of age of a young gang member in Airdrie.' - Sarah Hughes, The Independent
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I received a proof copy of this book back in the autumn. I read it in two days and since then have pondered how to do justice to this accomplished book from this young author without trotting out the usual cliches.... More
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