Sugar Street
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
'An original and fascinating concept that'll keep you hooked and turning the pages' Sunday Post
'Expertly done' The Times
'[A] compelling, original novel' Independent
In Jonathan Dee's explosive novel, an unnamed male narrator has hit the road with a large sum of cash stashed under his car seat. Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he meets a city where his past is unlikely to track him down. Renting a room from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions, he seems to have escaped his former self. But can he?
In a story that moves with swift dark humour and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator's attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence. Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self - simplicity, kindness, and above all invisibility - grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbours in their politically divided working-class city.
Sugar Street is a risky, engrossing and visceral story about a white man trying to escape his own troubling footprint and start his life over.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dee returns 11 years after his Pulitzer finalist The Privileges with an energetic character study of a white man determined to escape from his life. It starts with a burst of electric first-person action, as the unnamed narrator drives on back roads across the country, keeping off the interstate to avoid cameras, with $168,048 in cash. The narrator dishes an acerbic perspective on the passing roadside ("unzoned hellscapes in which every fast-food restaurant on earth operates a franchise side by side") and his aversion to surveillance belies a vague paranoia. He rents an unlisted room in a small unspecified city from Autumn, a healthcare worker and heavy drinker. There, his self-imposed isolation proves easier in theory than practice. After a child named Abiha accidentally drops her notebook outside Autumn's house on her way to school, the narrator returns it. The satisfaction of helping Abiha, whom he describes as a "person of color," whets his appetite for more acts of anonymous charity with his surplus of cash. Before long, he arouses suspicions from Autumn, the neighborhood children, and the police, setting him on a collision course with the life he left behind. Though a bit slim, Dee's work grapples intriguingly with the narrator's liberal myopia. It stands as a showcase of Dee's masterly prose.
