Патрик Нит – лучшие книги

Книга английского писателя и известного диджея - это история жизни немолодой проститутки, рассказанная случайному попутчику. Казалось бы - что особенного? Но Патрику Ниту, талантливому во всем, удалось создать "роман о джазе, судьбе, семье и дружбе", за что он и получил Уитбредскую литературную премию.

The raucous novel that won the prestigious Whitbread Novel Award, Twelve Bar Blues is a virtuoso epic tale of fate and family, jazz and juju that spans three continents and two centuries to tell a story of enduring roots and indelible love. At its heart is Lick Holden, a talented but tormented young musician who sets the jazz scene of early-twentieth-century New Orleans on fire with the passionate tones of his coronet. But Lick's true passion is for his beautiful lost stepsister Sylvie, for whom he searches for among the streets, music halls, and bordellos of the South. Their story reverberates through the decades into the life of Sylvia Di Napoli, a black English former prostitute turned singer who travels from London to New York and Chicago in 1999 in search of the answer to the mystery of her family's roots. Funny and poignant, Twelve Bar Blues is a dynamic novel with all the emotional energy and breakneck tempo of a red-hot Big Easy jazz band that will hook you — like a favorite tune — until the very last page.

'He looks like a Brit, this guy. Full of good intentions and bad ideas'. Straddling two continents and two centuries, Patrick Neate's "Jerusalem" is a sweeping and hilarious epic of English misadventures abroad and at home. It features a self-serving MP lost and alone in an African dictatorship; a young, ultra-hip entrepreneur looking for something (or someone) new to exploit; and, an English veteran of a colonial war trying to save England from itself. With a host of other brilliant and brilliantly drawn characters, this is the funniest and most moving story of Englishness as it never was, isn't now and, hopefully, will never be.

An inspiring mission to rescue young people from drugs and violence with music

At a time when interest in Brazilian culture has reached an all-time high, and the stories of one person's ability to improve the lives of others has captured so many hearts, this unique book takes readers to the frontlines of a battle raging over control of the nation's poorest areas. Culture Is Our Weapon tells the story of Grupo Cultural AfroReggae, a Rio-based organization employing music and an appreciation for black culture to inspire residents of the favelas, or shantytowns, to resist the drugs that are ruining their neighborhoods. This is an inspiring look at an artistic explosion and the best and worst of Brazilian society.

From award-winning novelist Patrick Neate, a literary mystery that introduces a new kind of British detective, Ugandan-Indian Tommy Akhtar, and a side of London that the mystery world has never seen.

A contemporary murder mystery set in the heart of London, this is the story of Tommy Akhtar, hard-drinking veteran of the Mujahideen, devoted on, sometime private investigator and sometime idol to the thug-lites of the ethnic motley of West London. Hired by a bewitching prostitute, he's to track down the whereabouts of her missing friend, last seen meeting a client in a local dive. But as the search heats up, Tommy's case takes a turn for the sinister, as he's drawn into a murder investigation and the dark side of both the establishment and those who plan to overthrow it.

Written with all the energy and vividness that earned Neate a 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2001 Whitbread Novel Award, City of Tiny Lights is poised to find a wide new audience for its talented, charismatic young author.

Spurred by his own deep love of the music and its central role in his life, but troubled by the current state of mainstream hip-hop culture, Patrick Neate sets off to discover if the music and culture that mean so much to him have retained true cultural vitality and significance anywhere in the world. Covering five continents and cities as diverse as New York, Rio, Tokyo, and Johannesburg, Neate discovers hip-hop reinventing itself internationally, locally, and individually. Spirited and idealistic, yet grittily insightful, "Where You're At" is a global tour of a small planet, with hip-hop, in all its multifarious forms, as the main character.

There are Tariq and Emma, Tom and Karen, Kwesi, Freya, and Ami--city-dwelling thirty-somethingers whose youthful hopes and dreams have dissolved into failing careers, failing relationships, and failing health. And yet their dissatisfaction has scarcely occurred to them until the mythic Murray returns with his Murray fun and irritating ease with life. His reappearance makes them all remember how much fun they used to have and awakens in them old ambitions they thought were dead.
And as this weary group struggles with identity, morality, and the like, London's pigeons, also somehow spurred on by Murray's return, are having an identity crisis all their own--suddenly conscious of moments and matters that were once unremarkable, just as they themselves were. "The London Pigeon Wars"--extraordinary, bizarre, moving and magical--is an assured novel of discontented stirrings, in both man and bird, that give way to wars within the self and without. Patrick Neate's third novel is superbly written, brilliant, witty, and uproarious, securing for him a spot among the best of contemporary fiction writers.

Spurred by his own deep love of the music and its central role in his life, but troubled by the current state of mainstream hip-hop culture, Patrick Neate sets off to discover if the music and culture that mean so much to him have retained true cultural vitality and significance anywhere in the world. Covering five continents and cities as diverse as New York, Rio, Tokyo, and Johannesburg, Neate discovers hip-hop reinventing itself internationally, locally, and individually. Spirited and idealistic, yet grittily insightful, Where You're At is a global tour of a small planet, with hip-hop, in all its multifarious forms, as the main character.

The close resemblance of Patrick Neate's fictitious state of "Zambawi" to contemporary Zimbabwe, makes Musungu Jim and Great Chief Tuloko a tall but politically perceptive tale in which Neate takes the reader on a humorous tour of the downfall of a corrupt neo-colonial government.
Weaving from presidential palace to rural homestead, and from intercontinental hotel to red light district, this is a splendid farce, full of pathos and biting humour, reminiscent of Tom Sharpe. A clear sense of each character's humanity prevails as Neate entwines the destinies of a young English teacher whose naiveté saves him as he finds himself centre-stage in a growing rebellion, a herb-smoking witchdoctor who exercises mystical powers with uncanny skill, presidents down on their luck whose attempts to exercise any power are increasingly futile, the blessed-into-boredom presidential offspring who slowly learn to control their own destiny, and a disenchanted soldier who wishes he had stayed a poet. Storytelling is the framework for this tale, as Neate constructs whole oral histories, and local myths through which the characters come to find themselves. With frequent reference to Latin maxims, and "Zamba" proverbs, ancestral powers are invoked to unfold the rich tapestry of "Zamba" legend. The "Zamba" language and proverbs are cleverly close to, but not quite identifiable as Shona and Swahili, giving the whole farce an extraordinary credibility and life. --Oliver Phillips