Leadville

Edward Platt

2001 Winner

Somerset Maugham Award

2000 Winner

John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

26 March 2015
9781509801244
304 pages

Synopsis

"One afternoon in January 1995, as I drove along Western Avenue, I did what I had never done before: i parked the car in a side-street and walked on to the road..."

In Leadville, Ed Platt tells the story of Western Avenue from the optimism of its construction in the 1920s to its partial demolition seventy years later. It is a tale of the city and the traffic, of suburbia and the dreams of its inhabitants, and of our senseless and all-consuming love affair with the motor car.

'Platt has created a drama that is not only Orwellian in its attention to what you might call the state of the nation . . . but almost Dickensian in the recording of the colour and pathos of its inhabitants' Tim Lott, The Times