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Catriona Troth
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Ghost Town Kindle Edition

by Catriona Troth (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 out of 5 stars 13 ratings
1981. Coventry, city of Two Tone and Ska, is riven with battles between skinheads and young Asians.
Photographer Baz—‘too Paki to be white, too gora to be desi’—is capturing the conflict on film.
Unemployed graduate Maia—serial champion of liberal causes—is pregnant with a mixed-race child.
Neither can afford to let the racists win. They must take a stand.
A stand that will cost lives.

"Ghost Town transported me back to a time (late 70's early 80's) when I was young and like a lot of my contemporaries found my life shaped by bigger events around us. It was an era when skin heads and racism led to many confrontations and a deep anger which was the catalyst of an exploration of identity and making a stand. I would not have entered the Theatre if it wasn't for those years and the coming together of many of us and the explosion of culture and music that has evolved and endured. Catriona captures these young hearts, full of hope and love and fight. I found myself rooting for Baz and Maia right the way through, and came away with my own memories and humming all the songs from The Specials."
Sudha Bhuchar, Artistic director of Tamasha; actor and playwright.
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  1. Print length
    480 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    December 8, 2013
  4. File size
    705 KB
  5. Page Flip
    Enabled
  6. Word Wise
    Enabled
  7. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ghost Town transported me back to a time (late 70's early 80's) when I was young and like a lot of my contemporaries found my life shaped by bigger events around us. It was an era when skin heads and racism led to many confrontations and a deep anger which was the catalyst of an exploration of identity and making a stand. I would not have entered the Theatre if it wasn't for those years and the coming together of many of us and the explosion of culture and music that has evolved and endured. Catriona captures these young hearts, full of hope and love and fight. I found myself rooting for Baz and Maia right the way through, and came away with my own memories and humming all the songs from The Specials." Sudha Bhuchar, Founder of Tamasha Theatre; actor and playwright.

About the Author

Catriona Troth was born in Scotland and grew up in Canada before coming back to the UK. She has now lived in the Chilterns longer than she has ever lived in anywhere, a fact that still comes as a surprise. After more than twenty years spent writing technical reports at work and fiction on the commuter train, Catriona made the shift into freelance writing. She now writes a regular column for Words with Jam literary magazine, researches and writes articles for Quakers in the World and tweets as @L1bCat. She is very proud to be a member of the Triskele Books author collective. Her writing explores themes of identity and childhood memory.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00G6K9DQU
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Piebald Publishing (December 8, 2013)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 8, 2013
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 705 KB
  • Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 out of 5 stars 13 ratings

About the author

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Catriona Troth

Catriona Troth

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Catriona Troth was born in Scotland and grew up in Canada before coming back to the UK. She has now lived in the Chilterns longer than she has ever lived in anywhere, a fact that still comes as a surprise.

After more than twenty years spent writing technical reports at work and fiction on the commuter train, Catriona made the shift into freelance writing. She now writes a regular column for Words with Jam literary magazine, researches and writes articles for Quakers in the World and tweets as @L1bCat. She is very proud to be the latest member of the Triskele Books author collective.

Her writing explores themes of identity and childhood memory.

Her novella, Gift of the Raven, is set against a backcloth of Canada from the suburbs of Montreal to the forests of the Haida Gwaii.

Her novel, Ghost Town, is set in Coventry in 1981, when the city of Two Tone and Ska was riven with battles between skinheads and young Asians.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
13 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Deborah K. Matlack
    5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
    Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2015
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    I was captivated by the world of Maia and Baz from the first paragraph. Two people who didn't quite fit anywhere find each other amid racial tensions and rioting in 1980's Coventry, England. Every single character is a fully realized human being and the language and situations are rich and natural without ever being overblown or melodramatic. I could see the town and the people and felt real sympathy for the situations and troubles they found themselves in. Do yourself a favor, Read. This. Book.
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  • Rohan Quine
    5.0 out of 5 stars Authentic, ambitious, complex, subtle
    Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2014
    Ghost Town by Catriona Troth recreates Coventry in 1981, where racial tensions bubbled up into hatred and violence. Maia, a young white graduate carrying a child by a black South African man, becomes the girlfriend of Baz, whose birth to a Sikh father and white mother ensures that his journey through this terrain is far from easy. Through this relationship, and working for Baz at the homeless shelter he runs, she finds herself in the thick of the city’s racial dynamics—albeit with occasional flickers of feeling like an outsider, which diminish with her growing comprehension. It becomes clear that no one person in any of the various intersecting racial/social/political communities (including skinheads, the police, arts venues, and the charitable homeless shelter) is really in control of events or has a bird’s-eye view of them, because these events are not only complex, but also fast-moving and driven by powerful hidden undercurrents that tend to erupt unpredictably into visibility. There’s also a sense of apprehensive uncertainty, where unexpected assailants can appear, unseen vandals smash windows and set fires, weaselly rabble-rousers are sometimes glimpsed gloating over the rabbles they’ve roused, and precious little reconciliation or understanding between opposing forces is possible.

    There’s a pleasurably subtle, gently restless, level-toned yet unsparing quality to many aspects of Ghost Town, including these ones: the elusive nature of Maia, a reliable narratorial lens and yet a full individual with her own dramas too, whose open innocence manages to remain unsullied by seeing such ugliness and suffering around her; the novel’s smooth inclusion of quite a breadth of facts, terminology and historical detail (including several vivid trips out of Coventry, down to riot-torn Brixton); its ambitious and successful insistence on being at once a political story, a love story and a coming-of-age story; and the neat, quiet, clean division whereby about half the chapters are written in the first-person viewpoint of Maia, and the other half in the third person from the specific viewpoint of Baz.

    It feels true and appropriate that there are no easy answers in the book, no clear single climax or pretty aftermath at the end, but rather an uneasy calm, a sense that the characters’ resilience has been much tested but remains strong, and a resignation to the ineradicable brutishness in people. And yet, by the end there’s a feeling of hope: for we’ve also seen a lot of compassion too, not to mention finding love, humour and fun along the way, leaving us with a sense of the hard-won but authentic joy that may be snatched and caught and held onto, from this messy but fascinating journey we’ve all been pushed into together.
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Top reviews from other countries

  • P Courtney
    5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant and painful exploration of 1980s racial tension
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 7, 2014
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    GHOST TOWN is a unique and brilliant book. Set against a backdrop of the Coventry race riots in the 1980s - a period of British history I (shamefully) didn't know much about - it was not just a compelling read for me, but also a learning experience.

    Artfully alternating between the first person voice of Maia, a naïve and conflicted young white 20-something, and the third person viewpoint of Bahjan (Baz: 'too paki to be white, too gora to be desi'), the story takes us straight to the heart of the racial tensions that erupted across Britain in the early 80s: not the much talked-about Brixton riots, but the persecution of Pakistani and other Asian communities in the midlands.

    Then, as now, the mainstream media did little to cover the reality of events and it is clear that the author of GHOST TOWN did a lot of first-hand research to get to the bottom of what really happened. Young people were killed on the streets in violent clashes. Letterbox fire bombs were commonplace. The police did little to protect Asian families from ugly violence that is seen at close range by Maia and Baz. I get the impression that the gradual 'awakening' we see in Maia - her views on race and what it means to belong - is an awakening that the author experienced during her time as a twenty-something in Coventry. The character is utterly believable, as is that of Baz, which must have taken a lot more research in terms of dialect, attitudes and background, which again are very convincing.

    The plot cleverly weaves the bigger social themes into the main characters' stories without being clunky or too overt. Much of the plot centres around 'the Skipper', a homeless shelter in the heart of Coventry where the two main characters volunteer, and the intriguing range of frost-bitten down-and-outs who use its services. This choice of setting, like the theme of the book and the choice of voice, is unusual and different to that of most books I've read. Perhaps that's why I enjoyed it so much.

    It's hard to liken GHOST TOWN to anything else out there, but there were certainly echoes of Alex Wheatle's EAST OF ACRE LANE. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to step out of their comfort zone and explore a little-talked-about pocket of British history.
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  • Chris C
    5.0 out of 5 stars A vivid record of a recent historical event and a cracking good read
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 3, 2014
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    Ghost Town is a fascinating exploration of the Coventry riots of 1981 and the events leading to them. Catriona Troth handles her material with a subtle touch and doesn’t flinch from showing the tensions and conflicts within communities and families as well as those outside.
    As in all good fiction the heart of the story is an intimate account of the impact of these events on a small group of characters, particularly Maia and Baz. They meet when Maia comes to help out in the homeless shelter run by Baz. This is populated by the sad dregs of Thatcher’s Britain: those who’ve lost jobs that should have been for life, the ex-soldier trying to keep up appearances, as well as the long time rough sleepers and drunks. If this makes them sound like an amorphous mass of stereotypes nothing could be further from the truth. It’s one mark of the quality of Troth’s writing that each soon becomes a vivid individual.
    Baz is also a talented photographer helping to organise an exhibition by local artists from the British Asian community. The exhibition provides an excuse for neo-Nazis and skinheads to mount demos and spread racist discord. When Baz is forced into the role of informal spokesperson for the exhibition, his own mixed race heritage is highlighted and he realises that he and anyone associated with him is in danger.
    As the story develops, and the atmosphere in the town reaches boiling point, Troth keeps the reader guessing with an intriguing mystery as Baz and Maia realise they are under threat from someone with a very personal grudge against them. But is it a figure from Baz’s past or someone else they have angered more recently?
    As the back stories of the two main characters are revealed it becomes clear that these also have a huge impact on their present day lives. In Maia’s case it’s a friendship from her recent past that has changed everything. During the course of the story it’s brought brutally home to her just how great will be the challenges she must face for the whole of her future life. In contrast Baz is scarred by a trauma from his childhood that has powerful reverberations in the here and now of the racial conflicts in his home town.
    Ghost Town works as both a vivid record of a recent historical event and as a cracking good read.
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  • Ms. J. E. Davis
    4.0 out of 5 stars These were my teenage years
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 14, 2014
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    I must admit that I was drawn to Ghost Town because of its 2-Tone reference. However, Catriona Troth has captured a slice of glossed-over British history that seems particulary relevant now, not only in the wake of the recent riots, but also with the rise of the far right.

    In 1981, I was a 14 years old and at the time of the Brixton Riots I shared a two-bedded hospital room with a 16-year-old boy who had been involved in them and had suffered a broken jaw. It seems highly inappropriate now, that I should have been paired off with a boy, let alone someone who knew he was going to arrested as soon as he was released. If I appear to be getting off the point, what I am trying to explain is that the news reported what was going on in London. I admit, there was a degree of excitement to being put in a hospital room with a 'rioter'. I was completely oblivious to what was going on only a three-hour drive away. The 2-Tone music that I loved then as I do now was all about racial harmony. I was unaware why it was so necessary and what had happenned in the City that gave life to it.

    This book is challenging on several levels. Sometimes an uncomfortable read, it demonstrates the vital role of fiction in tackling serious issues, such as the threat that is perceived when the demographics of a city change rapidly, particularly at a time of high unemployment. It puts the reader in the shoes of two characters, Maia, white and pregnant with a mixed-race child, and Baz, who knows how it feels to be an outsider. He is of mixed-race, an interloper between the Asain community and his foster mother, Rebeccah, and manager of a night shelter for the homeless. This is both a personal story of their journey together and the wider story - the conflict between the Asian Community and the Skinheads - which is based in fact. Although the obvious villains of the piece, the Skinheads are not the only danger. There is also the casual racism that I grew up which grows ever more vocal, and prejudice between the different black communities.

    I had only two small issues with the book. Maia's story was told in the first person, whilst Baz's story was told in the third person. Whilst it didn't get in the way of a great read, I would have preferred either first or third person throughout. The second was Baz's acceptance that Maia was pregnant with another man's child. Baz's answer to the question, 'Was the thought of my being pregnant so horrifying?' was a concerned, 'Is that what you thought?' Deciding to have your own child at a young age is hard enough. Taking on someone else's seems almost saintly.

    I would recommend this book in particular to readers who enjoyed Polly Courtney's Feral Youth.
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  • MadCow
    5.0 out of 5 stars Evocative of time and place
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2013
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    I've never been to Coventry but I feel that I could find my way around simply by having read this book. The city comes alive almost as a character itself. Also the time - early 80s - is evoked so well it brought back vivid memories of songs, of movements, of clothes, of the political spectrum.

    Ms Troth has a terrific ear for voices and accents; her characters come fully formed off the page by the sheer virtuosity of her ventriliquism. She gives us an insight into a variety of different cultures and I never felt that her knowledge was superficial. She inhabits the worlds of her characters and shows us their strentghs, their weaknesses, their quirks.

    If I have one criticism of this book, it is that it was over too soon. I would happily have read on.
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  • Sue Curd
    4.0 out of 5 stars riots back a couple of decades
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 19, 2014
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    At first I found this book difficult mainly because there are two equally strong main characters and it wasn't always clear who was speaking - each of their two voices are similar, caring, slight outsiders but in the thick of the action when the chips are down.
    It seems timely to have a book that gets under the skin of those riots in the early 80s just when we hear rumours of police introducing water cannons. Once I got into the story I found this difficult to put down. I highly recommend this book.
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