Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs

by D. D. Johnston

Overview

A coming of age story set in a Scottish fast food restaurant: take a group of full time burger flippers and cash starved students, add a likeable geek with a love of political theory, and a passionately angry French anarchist, and you have a recipe for rebellion. Rife with dry British humor and working-class sensibilities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781849350624
Publisher:	AK Press
Publication date:	07/19/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	640 KB

About the Author

D.D. Johnston: D.D.Johnston was born in Scotland in 1979. He has worked as a labourer, a dishwasher, a nightclub bouncer, and a burger jockey. While flipping burgers he helped to start an underground trade union, studied for a degree in sociology,and became interested in anarchist politics. He participated in anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and anti-war protests across Europe, but after being seriously injured in a street fight he decided that the pen is at least as mighty as the flagpole. Since settling in England in 2005, he has worked as a ghost writer and has written short fiction. Today he is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire. Peace, Love, and Petrol Bombs is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

In Johnston's rambling debut novel, young Scottish revolutionaries come to terms with themselves and the world around them. The second title in a new fiction series from anarchist publisher AK Press, Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs moves at a random pace, bouncing between countries, characters, and years. Set in the heady days of the early anti-globalization movement and revolving around a motley group of friends working at a Benny's Burgers franchise in fictional Dundule, Scotland, the book is billed as a "modern working-class novel." As a labor conflict at the restaurant scatters narrator Wayne Foster and his comrades around the world, relationships crumble, the war on terror rages, and the anti-capitalist movement stutters. Johnston's under-developed characters flit from having cheap sex to staging hunger strikes, but at least Wayne—despite severe feelings of disillusionment and loss—proves charming in a book filled with unlikeable characters. Though Johnson demonstrates the strength of his descriptive prose, some chapters seemed more like short stories unto themselves, rather than key elements in the novel's evolution. Readers also will need to become accustomed to the Scottish dialect Johnston uses, in which "ken" means "know" and "dinae" means "don't." (June)

Publishers Weekly