'John King is an adventurous avant-garde novelist. The sheer virtuosity of his language overflows with a richness of invention.' -Boyd Tonkin, The Independent Best known for the social realism of novels such as The Football Factory, Human Punk, and London Country, John King's writing also carries speculative strands, with his interest in dystopian fiction clear in several books. The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler took this further, and the main story in this collection, 'Machine Elves De...

A raw, powerful first novel, The Football Factory centres on Tom Johnson, a reasoned 'Chelsea hooligan' who represents a disaffected society operating by brutal rules. We are shown the realities of life - social degradation, unemployment, racism, casual violence, excessive drink and bad sex - and, perhaps more importantly, how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division.Graphic and disturbing, occasionally very funny, and deeply affe...

For fifteen-year-old Martin, growing up in Slough, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, reggae music, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cut-throat Teds and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet - until he is beaten up and thrown in the Grand Union Canal with his best mate Smiles.Fast forward to 1988, and Joe is traveling home on the Trans-Siberian express after three years working in a Hong Kong bar, remembering the highs and lows of the intervening years...

Having examined England's twin obsessions - violence and sex - in THE FOOTBALL FACTORY and HEADHUNTERS, John King completes his trilogy with ENGLAND AWAY: sex and violence abroad, under the Union Jack. The novel works on three levels - past, present and future - as pensioner Bill Farrell remembers his war experiences in a London pub, Tommy Johnson fights his way through Holland and Germany for an England football match in Berlin, and Harry considers the future fuelled by doses of Dutch sku...

It is sometime in the future and the individual nations of Europe no longer exist. The EU's mission has reached its final stage in the form of the USE, with power fully centralised. This corporate-driven, closet dictatorship promotes New Democracy, its true nature hidden behind fake smiles, easy debt and empty liberal rhetoric. With the cities run by Good Europeans, locals live as second-class citizens. But across Europe resistance groups fight back, and Britain is no different.In ...

“Tribal Leadership gives amazingly insightful perspective on how people interact and succeed. I learned about myself and learned lessons I will carry with me and reflect on for the rest of my life.”—John W. Fanning, Founding Chairman and CEO napster Inc.“An unusually nuanced view of high-performance cultures.”—Inc.Within each corporation are anywhere from a few to hundreds of separate tribes. In Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, John Ki...

The Football Factory is driven by its two main characters - late-twenties warehouseman Tommy Johnson and retired ex-soldier Bill Farrell. Tommy is angry at his situation in life and lives for his time with a gang of football hooligans. Bill, meanwhile, is a Second World War hero who helped liberate a concentration camp and married a survivor. Tommy and Bill have shared feelings, but express their views in different ways. Born at another time, they could have been the other. As the book unf...

Following on from his bestselling study of violence, The Football Factory, John King considers Britain's other obsession - sex. Formed in the chemical mists of New Year's Eve, The Sex Division sees the once sacred act of procreation at its most material, as five men devise a system based on the sexual act. In this lager-soaked league, the most that women can offer a man is 4 points - unless, that is, she leaves her handbag unattended...From its base in the asset-stripped, ...

Following on from his bestselling study of violence, The Football Factory, John King considers Britain's other obsession - sex. Formed in the chemical mists of New Year's Eve, The Sex Division sees the once sacred act of procreation at its most material, as five men devise a system based on the sexual act. In this lager-soaked league, the most that women can offer a man is 4 points - unless, that is, she leaves her handbag unattended...From its base in the asset-stripped, ...

It’s a fact of life: birds flock, fish school, people “tribe.” Malcolm Gladwell and other authors have written about how the fact that humans are genetically programmed to form “tribes” of 20-150 people has proven true throughout our species’ history. Every company in the word consists of an interconnected network of tribes (A tribe is defined as a group of between 20 and 150 people in which everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows of everyone else).In Tribal Leadership, Dav...

From their ability to use energy from sunlight to make their own food, to combating attacks from diseases and predators, plants have evolved an amazing range of life-sustaining strategies. Written with the non-specialist in mind, John King's lively natural history explains how plants function, from how they gain energy and nutrition to how they grow, develop and ultimately die. New to this edition is a section devoted to plants and the environment, exploring how problems created by human a...

Headhunters is the story of five friends. Carter USM is a live wire who lives on the edge; Mango can't stop thinking; Harry is a beer-lover and dreamer; Balti his drinking partner, out of work and hoping for a fresh start; while Will is the quiet romantic, a voice of reason as the lives of the others become increasingly chaotic. It is also a story of London, rooted in the streets, workplaces, pubs and music - but a parallel society exists where the planet's wealthy can buy and sell whateve...