The Alternative Hero
  • Published: 15 March 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099531784
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $19.99
Categories:

The Alternative Hero

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Sep 2010
Paperback
15 Mar 2010
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A wonderful novel about music, idols and obsessive fans: if you were alive and listening to rock in the '90s, read this book.

By the time most people hit 30, they've managed to do one of the following things:
1. Grow up
2. Quit idolising rock stars
3. Move on a bit from the music they were obsessed with at the age of 17.

Clive Beresford has failed to do all three. But that's about to change.

One unremarkable Saturday morning Clive sees the biggest alternative-pop star of them all walking down the high street with his dry-cleaning: Lance Webster, disgraced ex-singer of Thieving Magpies ('the biggest British band to emerge from the late-eighties indie-boom' Rolling Stone). Clive hatches a ramshackle plan to befriend his idol and grab the scoop of a lifetime - why did Webster burn out? The ensuing chaos forces both men to revisit the sweat, feedback, T-shirts, stage-dives, hitch-hikes, snakebites and hangovers of British alternative rock at the start of the nineties; to quote Lance Webster himself, 'before Britpop came along and fucked everything up'...
  • Published: 15 March 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099531784
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $19.99
Categories:

About the author

Tim Thornton

Tim Thornton was born in Darlington in 1973. Despite a boarding-school education and a degree in Drama, his adulthood has largely been spent playing the drums, currently for alt-blues act Fink.

In 2006 he escaped from behind the drumkit and headed for his laptop where he attempted to do what few drummers had done before: string a written sentence together. In fact he managed around 15,000 of them, forming the backbone of his first novel, The Alternative Hero, published by Jonathan Cape in 2009.

In 2010 Tim's years of being in bands (9 unsigned, 2 signed) climaxed in a second novel, Death of an Unsigned Band, which contains a further 12,000 sentences, some of which contain verbs.

Praise for The Alternative Hero

With The Alternative Hero, Tim Thornton has gone through the looking glass of obsessive fandom and brought back a hilarious, memorable, and hard-rocking tale

Madison Smartt Bell, author of 'All Souls' Rising'

A deliciously bittersweet novel that will touch the heart of anybody who ever fell in love with rock and roll

Mick Brown, author of 'Tearing Down the Wall of Sound'

Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume

Jay McInerney

Sparkly and authentic

Mark Hodkinson, The Times

Brilliant depictions of the era...nails it so precisely

Stuart Evers, The Word

Thornton explores the gentle complexities of this odd couple with wit and warmth

Independent

It's the usual lad-lit comic romp ... but it's fresher, funnier and more amiable than most

Brandon Robshaw, Independent on Sunday

The indiest book of all time

Guardian
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