Chinatown Beat by Henry Chang (Soho Press 2006)

Manhattan was twenty-two square miles and if he took his time, he'd cover it in two hours. He needed the air, needed to clear the alcohol from his head. The perspective from the driver's seat was a bittersweet pleasure to him.

He continued east.

The Greater Chinatown Dream, the Nationalists had called it: an all-yellow district in lower Manhattan running from the Battery to Fourteenth street, river to river, east to west, by the year 2000.

Then he turned the car north and made all the green lights through loisaida, the Lower East Side, past the Welfare Projects - the Wagner, Rutgers, Baruch, Gouverneur - federally subsidized highrises, which ran along the East River, blocs of buildings that stood out like racial fortresses. Blacks in the Smith Houses, Latinos in the Towers.

That's how the Lower East Side really was, not a melting pot but a patchwork quilt of different communities of people coexisting, sometimes with great difficulty.

Manhattan was symbolic of the rest of Gotham, the Big City, where the best walked the streets alongside the worst.

When the red light caught him, he was already past Alphabet City, in that part of the East Village where the druggie nation came to score: smoke, crack, rocks, pharmaceuticals, and a brand of Mott Street H tagged China Cat, so potent and poisonous it had sent twelve of the hardcore straight to junkie heaven in August, keeping the Ninth Precinct narcs tossing.

Matters of Life & Death & Other Stories by Bernard MacLaverty (W. W. Norton & Company 2006)

'It was a shame about the Orrs having to leave,' said Bill.

'Yeah.'

'But it wouldn't have been wise for him to stay.'

'Why?'

'After the threat.'

'But all cops get threatened.'

'Not on pirate radio, they don't.' Ben stared at him. 'They gave out his address on Radio Free Whatever.'

'Fuck.'

'And the powers that be said it was a serious threat. A bomb threat. That's why he came round us all. He was very apologetic.'

'What do you mean - came round us all?'

'Didn't he come and tell you to put the girls in the back bedroom?'

'No.'

Bill looked confused.

'He said he went round everybody. Warned them.'

'Not me, he didn't.' Ben sipped at his drink and stared at Bill. 'Maybe he said something to Maureen.'

Ben went off in search of his wife. He took her from a conversation with three other women sitting on the floor and beckoned her out of the noise into a coat recess in the hall.

'Did Dawson tell you someone was itching to bomb him? Did he tell you to put the kids in the back bedroom?'

'No.'

Ben bit his lip.

'Why?' said Maureen.

'That's what I want to know. Why did he not warn us? He warned everybody else.'

'Jesus.'

'We're Catholics.' He threw back his head and whooped in disbelief. 'Fuckin Fenian bastards. That's what we are.'

You don't mean it was deliberate?'

'What other way is there of looking at it?'

'Not only did he not warn us,' Ben's eyes widened with realisation, 'he tried to set us up. That's what the bad parking of the car was all about. He wasn't drunk. He didn't miss. He parked his fucking car in front of my house so's we'd get it . . .'

'Jesus. And he's got kids of his own.'

(From the short story, 'A Trusted Neighbour')

Too Much, Too Late by Marc Spitz (Three Rivers Press 2006)

Do you know the song "Talk of the Town" by the Pretenders? I always loved that song. I consider it probably one of the ten best singles ever released. Over the years, when intoxicated a certain way, I'd insist it's the best ever, but then I've also insisted that about "Bad Case of Loving You" by Robert Palmer, which just isn't true. Still, "Talk of the Town" is perfect every time I hear it. Maybe it's because I know the band's leader, Chrissie Hynde, is an Ohioan. Maybe because it's beautiful. I was hearing "Talk of the Town" in my head as we began our flight to John F. Kennedy International. "Oh, but it's hard to live by the rules. I never could and still never do," Chrissie sang.

I forced myself onto a bit of a high, and my walk had become a strut. I'm signed to Diphthong Records, I repeated to myself. My little band is worth one million dollars to someone. We've been played in Topeka and Athens and Istanbul. We were banned in Iran. Big in Japan. Very famous in places I would probably never visit. I am now middle-aged. But I'm a professional musician, and I will never have to work at anything else again. All you people who warned me to grow up? Fuck you. All you people who tried to grab me and take me down with them? You couldn't catch me, suckers. I am going to stay 18 for all time like Mr. Mick Jagger, and if you have a problem with that, you can kiss my arrested ass.

Harry . . . he had no strut and a much different interpretation of "Talk of the Town." He saw Chrissie Hynde's confession as a lament, whereas I was sure it was a boast.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson (Anchor Canada 2006)

He was lost. He wasn't used to being lost. He was the kind of man who drew up plans and then executed them efficiently, but now everything was conspiring against him in ways he decided he couldn't have foreseen. He had been stuck in a jam on the A1 for two mind-numbing hours so that it was already past the middle of the morning when he arrived in Edinburgh. Then he'd gone adrift on a one-way system and been thwarted by a road closed because of a burst water main. It had been raining, steadily and unforgivingly, on the drive north and had only begun to ease off as he hit the outskirts of town. The rain had in no way deterred the crowds - it had never occurred to him that Edinburgh was in the middle of 'the Festival' and that there would be carnival hordes of people milling around as the end of war had just been declared. The closest he had previously got to the Edinburgh Festival was accidentally turning on Late Night Review and seeing a bunch of middle-class wankers discussing some pretentious piece of fringe theatre.

Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile by Ramor Ryan (AK Press 2006)

The modern history of Mayday in Berlin follows this model. Mayday is a ritualistic confrontation between rebels and authority. As West Berlin became a haven for those avoiding the military draft, so an oasis of civil defiance, a pirate utopia, a quilombo of sorts was created by the dispossessed youth and the resident bohemian artists. The theatre of confrontation became Kreuzberg, traditionally a workers’ and migrants’ neighborhood now colonized by a multitude of politicized squatters. Anarchists, autonomes, punks, Turkish, and Kurdish youth fought pitched battles with armies of riot police. Burning barricades, tear-gas-filled streets, fierce combat, mass arrests, and police brutality became standard fare for Mayday in West Berlin.

So this day in East Berlin, the conflict has kicked off early. As the convoys of police vans descend on the park to witness the smoldering ruins of the burnt-out carcass of this dead beast, we have all already taken off. Now is the hour of the Black Bloc, the insurrectionary anarchists, the Maoists, the Trotskyites, the political hooligans, the casares (a reference to French rioters) and the drunken punks.

Mayday and I, aligning ourselves with one of the above categories (not sure which), cycle down to Oranienstrasse, the heart of historical Kreuzberg. There is a full-scale riot in progress and we arrive on the wrong side, behind the police lines. The sky is filled with flying objects raining down upon the besieged police lines. lt is a truly astonishing sight as paving stones, bottles, cans or whatever beat down like a medieval barrage. The lines and lines of riot cops are under intense pressure and occasionally one cop or another is carried behind, nursing an injury. "A handful of skilled stone-throwers can fend off a whole battalion of cops” explained Ringrose my elder sister’s boyfriend, years before when I was still a kid. He was of the earlier generation of Berlin Anarchists, who had raised the stakes in the early 1980's by taking to the street with combative resolve. And today, years later, his words resound as we witness maybe 50 stone-throwing militants holding off this street-full of riot cops. The tight street is a chaotic boiling pot of bedlam and as usual, the press is out in force, cameras everywhere, vultures stealing images to sell.

Weekend by William McIlvanney (Sceptre Paperbacks 2006)

She paused the tape and started to spool forward. She was looking for a moment during the question time that followed Harry Beck's lecture. Mickey Deans had asked a question in a tone of such aggression it had stirred the room from somnolence into tension. Eventually she found it.

'You mentioned in class once that you still regard yourself as a socialist. How is that possible when you have such a jaundiced view of humanity?'

She thought she could almost hear Harry Beck's sad smile.

'First thing is, I don't think it's jaundiced. I think any kind of hope begins in honestly trying to confront what you see as the truth. That's all I've been trying to do. It's the darkness of that truth as I see it that makes me a socialist. After all, the dark is where the dawn comes from. I don't believe in Utopia. You won't find it on any map we can ever make. And if it did exist, we couldn't breathe the air there. It would be too pure for us. But I believe in our ability to drift endlessly towards dystopia. We seem to be programmed for it. As if we were saying to ourselves: if we can't beat the dark, let's celebrate it. I'm against that. I'm a dystopian socialist. Socialism is an attempt to share as justly as we can with one another the terms of human experience. Don't do the dark's work for it. If it's only void out there, let's write our own defiant meaning on it. And make it a shared meaning. I think believing in good is the good. Against all the odds. Even if I'm part of the odds against us. I think it's what makes us what we are.'

The Damned Utd by David Peace (Faber and Faber 2006)

I get on the coach last and make Allan Clarke shift so I can sit next to Billy Bremner again. I try and make chit-chat. To break the ice. But Billy Bremner doesn't give a fuck about President Nixon or George Best. He's not interested in Frank Sinatra or Muhammad Ali. He doesn't want to talk about the World Cup, about playing against Brazil. Doesn't want to talk about his holidays. His family full stop. Bremner just looks out of the window and smokes the whole way down to Birmingham. Then, as the coach pulls into Villa Park, he turns to me and he says, 'If you're looking for a pal, Mr Clough, you can count me out.'