Book description
Spanning three continents and two centuries, Twelve Bar Blues
is an epic tale of fate, family, friendship and jazz. At its heart is
Lick Holden, a young jazz musician, who sets New Orleans on fire with
his cornet at the beginning of the last century. But Lick's passion is
to find his lost step-sister and that's a journey that leads him to a
place he can call 'home'. Meanwhile, at the other end of the century,
we find Sylvia, an English prostitute, and Jim, a young drifter.
They're in search of Sylvia's past, lost somewhere in the mists of the
Louisiana bayou.
Patrick Neate has written a story that straddles time and space,
love and friendship, roots and pilgrimage and everything between.
Poignant and hilarious, it will hook you - like a favourite tune -
till the end.
Patrick Neate is the author of five novels:
Musungu Jim and the
Great Chief Tuloko,
which won a Betty Trask Award,
Twelve Bar Blues,
which won the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award,
The London
Pigeon Wars,
City of Tiny Lights
and
Jerusalem.
His nonfiction includes
Where You're At
, which won the NBCC Award for Criticism in the USA. He is a Londoner.
