Forever and Ever Amen

Imagine BILLY LIAR rescripted on the premise of race instead of class, and you come close to the mixture of gritty realism and escapist fantasy that charges this debut with hypnotic energy... Excels at capturing the texture of its times... A CATCHER IN THE RYE set in the semi-detached streets of Ashton-under-Lyne 'A magical depiction of childhood' Manchester Evening News Graham Caveney, Sunday Express

Praise for Forever and Ever Amen 'We are inside the head of a little boy growing up in the Moss Side of the Sixties. The product of a Caribbean immigrant family, he finds himself disenfranchised from both the heritage of his parents and the history of his peers. Fortunately he has unlimited imagination and creates an alternative universe as vivid as a Technicolor musical. Imagine BILLY LIAR rescripted on the premise of race instead of class, and you come close to the mixture of gritty realism and escapist fantasy that charges this debut with hypnotic energy... Excels at capturing the texture of its times... A CATCHER IN THE RYE set in the semi-detached streets of Ashton-under-Lyne Graham Caveney, Sunday Express 'James is a vivacious young black boy, growing up in Sixties Moss Side whose daydreams feed into both British and Caribbean culture. He translates all aspects of his life into a fanfare, alive with music and dance. It is through this colourful haze that he gradually tells the tale of his family's emigration from St Kitts. Imaginative and amusing, Pemberton's debut brims with flavour... Charming' The Times 'There are many good reasons to read this book, not least for its insights into a community still little understood in Britain, and for a portrait of Moss Side far removed from its usual "guns 'n' gangs" image. Pemberton's real gift, though, is his evocation of childhood, comical yet never patronising, instantly reconginsable to anybody, of whatever culture. Sense of place is strong, and yet the end result is a kind of Mancunian magic realism, strange but familiar, able to hint at large themes even in a small-scale or domestic setting. And best of all, it's also very, very funny' Third Alternative 'An unusually intelligent and beautiful childhood memoir set in Manchester's nearby Moss Side at the end of the Sixties... FOREVER AND EVER AMEN describes the adventures of nine-year-old James, in the months before his family move "up in the world" to Ashton-under-Lyne. The young hero's vivid imagination blends reality with dreams, nightmares and fantasy, creating a world of bright colour, sensory delight and innocent glee... The real delight is Pemberton's easy, musical prose. Mundane episodes are twisted through James' eyes into fantastic Hollywood adventures and the dialogue sparkles with natural wit... Much of the charm of the novel is in its innocence and lack of cynicism' The Big Issue in the North 'Pemberton's novel magically recreates a childhood filled with music and fun, sorrow and scrapes' Belfast Telegraph 'A lovely book... a captivating read' Woman 2 Woman 'A magical depiction of childhood' Manchester Evening News 'A first novel with real warmth and an unusual take on childhood' What's On In Birmingham 'The charming tale of a little boy from St Kitts growing up in a grey and grimy inner-city cobbled street' Alive Amazon Review Described as a new voice in Black British Fiction, Joe Pemberton's first novel is a compelling story of childhood in the 1960s: the dreams and nightmares of a young Mancunian called James, whose family has moved to England from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. In some ways, this is not an easy story to tell; the Preface to For Ever and Ever Amen finds the author struggling to convince James and Aunty Mary--the complexity of this spectral character is uncovered slowly, and subtly, throughout the book--of the merits of writing a novel at all: "I tell them there's no story anyway, not the way they tell it. It's all bit and pieces, just little stories one by one." Divided into 32 short chapters, For Ever and Ever Amen provides the reader with the pieces of a complicated jigsaw. There are the conventional elements of a childhood story: the comforts and collisions of school and family, James's devotion to H.R. Puf-n-stuff, the lure of colour telly and the hints of the parents' past lives. On the other hand, "James was good at pretending" and Pemberton takes his readers into the fantasy life of a child whose family is on the move from Moss Side to Ashton-under-Lyne: "to a brand new semi-detached house with a front lawn and a garage and not another black face for miles, Dad said." That move hovers over the book, as if in anxious recall of the family's other life "back home", in the West Indies. With the help of Aunty Mary, James forges his daydreams between past and present, between Cadogen Street and St. Kitts, weaving a world from the scraps of speech and the old photographs which can transport him to a different landscape. It's a strange, and fragmented, world, one that, by the end of the book, Pemberton has spun into the kind of story hinted at by his Preface: a nuanced, multi-layered, plotted novel of one black family's life in the late 1960s. -- Vicky Lebeau - Author