This novel brought back a lot of vivid memories, with its evocative descriptions of civil and political strife from 1978 and 1983. I was fifteen in the earlier of those years, and remember proudly sporting my Rock Against Racism and Anti-Nazi League badges on the lapel of my school blazer (although I would rapidly … and cravenly … remove them once I actually arrived with the precincts of the school as any such political statement, however creditable, would be met with stern rebukes from prefects and teacher alike).

My adolescence was passed in what I now recognise as an almost idyllic existence in rural north Leicestershire, with precisely zero grounds for any rebellion, although at the time I frequently wished for a more urban milieu in which I might hope to find some barricades to man. Joe Thomas makes clear that Hackney in both 1978 and 1983 was far from my Leicestershire Utopia, and that people of African, Caribbean and Asian descent were regularly subjected to vile racist abuse and attacks, frequently ignored (or even abetted) by a local police force all too often sympathetic to the abusers.

The novel follows a selection of characters, including a detective who is trying to amass evidence of police wrongdoing with the help of a couple of undercover operative who have infiltrated extreme groups, a left wing lawyer within Hackney Council who is struggling to find legal methods of limiting the spread of the National Front (early forerunner of the British national Party that still seems to operate today) and a journalist of American extraction who catalogues the principal incidents.

There are some wonderful descriptions of the large festivals arranged across London to spread an anti-racist message, mass marches and the counter demonstrations by left- and right-wing groups that they provoked. There are cameo appearances by Paul Weller and The Ruts (how I loved their big hit Babylon’s Burning back in the day), and a fabulous cast of political figures (real and fictional).

I am not sure that I enjoyed this, exactly – the underlying themes were too grim for that, but I found it an utterly engrossing novel, and I am looking forward to the two following volumes. ( )

East London in the 1970s and a battleground between the National Front and the Anti-Nazi League. After the death of Muslim man supposedly at the hands of racists the area is a powder keg. For police officer Patrick 'Chance' Noble, the opportunity to look at organised violence, for photographer Suzi Scialfa, an opportunity to progress her career. 1983 and the threats are not so much from the National Front as Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party. Another death in suspicious circumstances and for Chance, an opportunity for redemption and looking at police corruption.

This is a wonderful book with a real sense of time and place. I was more at home with the 1980s references but still could remember the Rock Against Racism movement of the late 1970s. Thomas has conjured up the poverty and grime of life in council estates and condemned housing, the grubbiness of prostitution and drugs and the desperation of those fighting oppression. This is a vivid and masterful piece of writing. ( )