“When you read these worlds in books, it’s normally by a middle-class writer who creates a one-dimensional villain,” Douglas Stuart, who won last year’s Booker for “Shuggie Bain,” his debut novel about working-class life, said in a phone interview, “but Gabriel’s created a world so rich in detail, and motivation and consequence.”
Krauze insisted the book is far more than a lurid tale. “It’s a moral confrontation with the reader,” he said, claiming it forces readers to realize some people commit crime because of their psychology, as well as poverty or a lack of opportunity.
The author’s note in some editions of the book is clearer still. “This is the life I chose,” he writes. “Maybe I was looking for a sense of family and identity that I couldn’t find at home. Maybe it’s the way I found my people and they found me.”
Krauze was born in northwest London to a newspaper cartoonist and a painter who had both immigrated from Poland. He grew up around the corner from the South Kilburn estate, in an apartment where his twin brother practiced violin for hours a day. He became obsessed with books as a child, devouring everything from Tolkien to nonfiction about World War I, and realized he wanted to become a writer by the time he was 13.
That same year, he also threatened someone with a knife for the first time, and saw his first stabbing. “I was in a youth club, and someone right next to me just got poked up, blood all over the floor, boom, boom, boom,” he said.
At 14, Krauze was arrested for the first time after he was caught stealing video cassettes. He began spending more time on the South Kilburn estate with his friends, partly to escape his mother’s glare. By age 17, he was involved in so many brushes with violence and the law that he started writing it down — on scraps of paper, in cellphones — insisting he would one day turn it into a book. At one court hearing, he joked with his lawyer about the books he should read in prison.
The Link LonkJune 27, 2021 at 11:32PM
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With a Violent Debut, He Reveals a London That Is Rarely Seen - The New York Times
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