The North West Parallel 1999
The North West Parallel 1999 — William Dann Illustrated by José Francisco OleaLondon, 1998. William Dann is twenty-two years old, newly evicted, and starting over in a bedsit above a newsagent's in the north west of the city.What he finds there surprises him. A Scottish barber who plays music too loud and cuts hair from a chair in the middle of his room. A sixty-year-old Trinidadian music pioneer who remembers when the streets weren't safe — and who built a late-night club where they became safe again. A Polish Olympic judo coach washing dishes twelve hours a day to send money home to his children. A German woman who is either falling in love with William or not, and won't make it easy either way.By day William works the silver service at one of London's grandest hotels — invisible to the guests he serves, noticed only when something goes wrong. By night he moves through the world of the BackBeat club, where Ra's philosophy is simple: music crosses every border that human beings invent.Then the bombs start. Brixton. Brick Lane. Old Compton Street. Three nails in the year before the millennium, and suddenly the question that a generation hoped they'd already answered is back on the table: how does this keep happening?The North West Parallel 1999 is a story about community built in the gaps. About the specific texture of London at the end of a century — the hotels, the markets, the clubs, the stairwells of shared houses where people from everywhere end up living alongside each other and, mostly, getting on. It is a love story, a portrait of a city under pressure, and a quiet argument that the distance between 1999 and now is shorter than we would like to believe.Illustrated throughout with original black-and-white artwork by José Francisco Olea.276 pages. Full illustrations. Instant download.
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