It gets into your bones. You don't even realise it, until you're driving through it, watching all the things you've always known and leaving them behind. Young Londoners Becky, Harry and Leon are leaving the city in a fourth-hand Ford Cortina with a suitcase full of money. They are also leaving behind Pete, Becky's boyfriend, at his surprise birthday party. Moving back in time - and into the heart of London - The Bricks that Built the Houses explores a cross-section of contemporary urban life with a powerful moral microscope, giving us intimate stories of hidden lives, and showing us that good intentions don't always lead to the right decisions.
'[Kate Tempest] is language, passion and politics, and if that isn't life, what is?' -- Jeanette Winterson
'A talent that knows no bounds Independent A wunderkind rapper and spoken word performer equally influenced by Wu-Tang Clan and Joyce, Bukowski and Blake ... Such dichotomies not only attest to the 29-year-old Kate Tempest's gift for shattering - and transcending - convention and conventional genres, but they also underscore the tensions and contradictions that fuel her dynamic art' -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
'Mesmerising ... Humanity is celebrated in all its terrible imperfections ... A genuinely galvanising presence' Guardian
Author
About Kate Tempest
Poet, rapper, playwright and novelist Kate Tempest is from south London. Her epic poem Brand New Ancients won the Ted Hughes Prize for poetry in 2013. The following year she was named by the Poetry Society as a Next Generation Poet. In the same week her debut solo album, Everybody Down, a narrative driven hip hop record involving the same characters as the novel, was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize 2014. Her most recent poetry collection is the acclaimed Hold Your Own. The Bricks that Built the Houses is her first novel.
