During a random revisiting of Penton Mound I popped into Borders - a bookshop I'd previously only found useful as a place to take the kids on a wet day and for picking up a copy of the Lobster. On the way out I was drawn to the dog-eared kicked-around bargain book table piled high with out-of-date software manuals and found a copy of 'The Outcast's Burden'. It was the self-published look of it that made me pick it up - all the best writers self-publish. I flipped it over: "A non-fabulous fable...that argues itself into a fugue of club-footed heroism" Iain Sinclair. And inside the map that you see above.
I rushed to the counter with it - parting with a mere £1.49 and took off to the now gastropubbed-beyond-recognition Albion. I'd just read the first manic page when the comedienne Jenny Eclair came to my table to take a chair and asked what I was reading. What could I say? "It's a splenetic millenial psychogeograpical fable" I replied. "Oooh well, enjoy it" she said.
I drank up and left.
2 comments:
But is it any good?
Note the 'Antartica's ice shelf' on the mapjust south of Barnet. I've actually got a copy of this book and like the way it refuses to growl knowingly in that tight-chested (it is the chest, isn't it?) Oxbridge manner that assumes it knows the value of everything. I actually met the guy who wrote it at the launch of London: City of Disappearances and am happy to see this work receive credit.
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