'A sprawling and unusual extravaganza of a novel, in which form and content are brilliantly reflected by one another: the ranginess of the story mirrors the arbitrariness of life, while the electrifying prose brings to life characters whose experiences span one century, several cultures and many colours. Vivid, bold and energetic, Patrick Neate sets a high standard for modern fiction.' Whitbread judges 2001

biography

Patrick Neate was tipped as one of the Independent on Sunday's 20 best novelists under 30 - 'the new William Boyd.' His first novel Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko won a Betty Trask Award. Twelve Bar Blues, his second novel, won the 2001 Whitbread Novel Award. The London Pigeon Wars will be published by Penguin in April 2003.

summary of twelve bar blues

Split into two parts, Twelve Bar Blues roams through a hundred years, three continents and many stories. The first part of the novel focuses on a young man named Lick Holden, as we follow him from his raucous birth at the turn of the last century, to his success as a jazz musician in New Orleans, and his journey to find his lost step-sister. At the other end of century, we meet Sylvia, a prostitute who is also searching, for her real father, and through this, her own identity. The twin focus on these characters brings together the many disparate threads that Neate seems to delight in spinning, while structuring everything around the harmonic progression of the twelve bar blues.

Like the jazz that permeates it, this novel is vivid, noisy and full of life. Often hilarious, it simultaneously manages to be subtle and touching, while also providing comment on race relations.

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