The Bricks that Built the Houses
Kate Tempest
(Author)
Description
The highly anticipated debut novel from Kae Tempest--acclaimed poet, playwright, rapper, and recording artist--proves their talent to be boundless and unstoppable.
Becky, Harry, and Leon are leaving London in a fourth-hand Ford with a suitcase full of stolen money, in a mess of tangled loyalties and impulses. But can they truly leave the city that's in their bones?
Kae Tempest's novel reaches back through time--through tensely quiet dining rooms and crassly loud clubs--to the first time Becky and Harry meet. It sprawls through their lives and those they touch--of their families and friends and faces on the street--revealing intimacies and the moments that make them. And it captures the contemporary struggle of urban life, of young people seeking jobs or juggling jobs, harboring ambitions and making compromises.
The Bricks that Built the Houses is an unexpected love story. It's about being young, but being part of something old. It's about how we become ourselves, and how we effect our futures. Rich in character and restless in perspective, driven by ethics and empathy, it asks--and seeks to answer--how best to live with and love one another.
Kae Tempest, a major talent in the poetry and music worlds, sits poised to become a major novelist as well.
Product Details
| Publisher | Bloomsbury USA |
| Publish Date | May 03, 2016 |
| Pages | 416 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781620409015 |
| Dimensions | 8.5 X 149.6 X 33.5 mm | 1.3 pounds |
About the Author
Kae Tempest is a poet. They are also a writer, a lyricist, a performer and a recording artist. They have published plays, poems, a novel, a book length non-fiction essay, released albums and toured extensively, selling out shows from Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro. They received Mercury Music Prize nominations for both of the albums Everybody Down and Let Them Eat Chaos and two Ivor Novello nominations for their song-writing on The Book of Traps and Lessons. They were named a Next Generation Poet in 2014, a once in a decade accolade. They received the Ted Hughes Award for their longform narrative poem Brand New Ancients and the Leone D'Argento at the Venice Teatro Biennale for their work as a playwright. Their books have been translated into eleven languages and published to critical acclaim around the world. They were born in London in 1985 where they still live. They hope to continue putting words together for a long time
kaetempest.co.uk
@kaetempest
Reviews
“[The Bricks that Built the Houses] marks the arrival of a significant new voice . . . deeply affecting: cinematic in scope; touching in its emphatic humanity . . . Tempest's voice--by turns raging and tender--never falters. By the time the novel reaches its cleareyed climax, cleverly undercutting its own promised happy ending, the reader is left with the impression of a work that hums with human life.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
“A novel that perfectly captures the modern trials and tribulations of youth and urban life in London.” —BuzzFeed
“Tempest has a knack for the devastating throwaway line--a skill-honed, no doubt, from years of rapping and spoken-word performances. [Their] work is rich with underlinable lines . . . Captivating.” —New Yorker
“[Tempest is] a Zadie Smith if Smith were in her 20s again . . . An artistic prodigy . . . [Their] captivating The Bricks That Built the Houses is rich in detail, clever in plot and filled with characters who live on the edge but never quite give up.” —Shelf Awareness
“With a scope that rivals Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, Tempest juggles themes of family, history, and womanhood.” —Booklist
“This is a bold, bright, beguiling novel; a lustrous pageant that dazzles and grips . . . [Tempest] may well be unstoppable.” —Sunday Telegraph
“Blake, Shakespeare, Eliot, the Wu-Tang Clan: when an artist's outlook on boundaries is so dizzyingly open, you long to know what happens next.” —The Guardian
“Tempest is brilliant at capturing a distinctly contemporary state of mind . . . [Their] writing has a startling, unmediated freshness.” —Metro
“[This] fast-paced, filmic narrative brims with energy.” —Vogue UK
“It's hard not to be blown away by Kae Tempest … A stirring, post-Dickensian lens trained on London's lonely underbelly.” —Evening Standard
“[Kae] has that vanishingly rare combination of heavyweight literary credentials and, having started out as a spoken-word artist on the hip-hop scene, a deep understanding of [London] at street level. Both of these aspects of [their] writing shine through in The Bricks That Built the Houses, which is as lyrical as it is gritty.” —New Statesman
“Tempest is a worthy champion for a generation of disillusioned youth.” —Sunday Times
“Explosive . . . It fairly flies off the page.” —Observer
“Remarkable not only for its timely commentary on the financial difficulties faced by many millennials, but for its meticulous examination of parents' inability to understand their children's struggles . . . The Bricks That Built the Houses creates a complex narrative that rarely falters and eventually coheres into a strong and lyrical whole.” —The Millions
“Uncontainable . . . In [their] restless, relentless creativity, this unique talent hops freely from one art form to another . . . Tempest has proved you can have intergenerational appeal and still be cool, and that you can stretch your creative wings and not settle in one place. Long may [they] continue.” —Lyn Gardner, Guardian
“When Tempest's angst-ridden lyricism is let off the leash, the effect is thrilling . . . [Their] lonely protagonists . . . come to seem both painfully particular and impressively archetypal . . . Pinpoint evocation of a milieu, its texture and contours, all delivered with an intensely gathered and focused energy.” —Alex Clark, Guardian
Earn by promoting books
