Up The Junction: A Virago Modern Classic

Published in 1963, Up the Junction won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and was adapted into a film. It also inspired a song of the same name. 'We stand, the three of us, me, Sylvie and Rube, pressed up against the saloon door, brown ales clutched in our hands. Rube, neck stiff so as not to shake her beehive, stares sultrily round the packed pub.'The girls - Rube, Lily and Sylvie - work at McCrindle's sweet factory during the week, and on Saturday they go up the Junction in their clattering stilettos. In these uninhibited, spirited vignettes of young women's lives in South London in the sixties, money is scarce and enjoyment to be grabbed while it can.Nell Dunn shot to fame with Up the Junction (1963) and Poor Cow (1967), both of which became successful films. Up the Junction won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. WINNER OF THE JOHN LLEWELLYN RHYS MEMORIAL PRIZE 'Her art is ignited by voice, as you hear it, is unquestionable' ALI SMITH, GUARDIAN 'Distinctive, pared-down style' DAVID EVANS, INDEPENDENT 'Unflinching look at the lives of working-class women' DAILY MAIL Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In this novel, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry. Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful and timeless testimonial to it.