The Dirty South - Softcover

Alex Wheatle was born in 1963 to Jamaican parents living in London. He spent most of his childhood in a children's home, which he left at 14 to live in a hostel in Brixton. At 18, he was involved in the Brixton uprising and went to prison for 3 months. He now writes full-time.

Twenty-five years after his Jamaican-born parents lived through the terrible Brixton riots, Dennis Huggins is essentially a middle-class English teenager. He lives with his parents; his father is a librarian, and his mother is an office worker, and they want Dennis to become a university professor. But Brixton’s street life and the lure of easy money turn Dennis to dealing marijuana with his wild friend, Noel, and bad times seem preordained. Wheatle lived the life he describes in this engaging novel, and his portrait of Brixton captures a community in the throes of change as new immigrant groups and new societal forces create new stresses (e.g., converts to Islam functioning as criminal gangs and running protection and extortion rackets). For American readers, this portrait may be a little jarring; Wheatle’s Brixton sounds far more functional than Chicago’s South and West Sides or L.A.’s South Central. American readers will also have to puzzle out some of the Brixton street slang, but The Dirty South is well worth the effort. --Thomas Gaughan