China Dreams

Description

For weeks they went all over London on the little red Honda, weaving up hills at walking speed, down alleys and pavements, through shopping precincts, warm in the late-summer nights .. and he’d park outside pubs, proud of his China girl …

For Tom it was a wonderful summer. Innocent, broke and slightly awestruck on his arrival in London, he was working as a delivery boy at a Chinese takeaway. Then May, the daughter of the owner, became his love. But suddenly, inexplicably, Tom loses his home, his job and his beloved. A squat, then a battered green van, become his refuge, his longing for May his one obsession. As Tom travels through the desperate sub cultures of low-life London, he is also caught up in his dreams about China, each more vivid and shocking than the last.

Loosely completing the ‘China trilogy’ begun with the award-winning Something Like A House and A House By The River, China Dreams is dazzling, disturbing, lyrical and occasionally fearsome – the story of a young man’s struggle to regain his lost love.

Author Information

Sid Smith spent the first seven years of his working life in labouring jobs including woodsman, hod-carrier, railway labourer, gravedigger, stagehand and self-employed gardener. Born in Preston, Lancashire, he now lives in London and writes extensively for newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, Something Like A House, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and forms a loose trilogy with A House By The River and China Dreams.