GB84: David Peace

Stylish, riveting and appalling, GB84 is a shocking fictional documentation of the violence, sleaze and fraudulence that characterised Thatcher’s Britain.

Great Britain. 1984. The miners’ strike. It is the closest Britain has come to civil war in fifty years, setting the government against the people.

In his trademark visceral prose, Peace describes the insidious workings of the boardroom negotiations and the increasingly anarchic coalfield battles; the struggle for influence in government and the dwindling powers of the NUM; and the corruption, intrigue and dirty tricks which run through the whole like a fault in a seam of coal.

David Peace has written a novel extraordinary in its reach, and unflinching in its capacity to recreate the brutality and passion that changed the course of British history in the late twentieth century.