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David Peace makes a powerful, angry, ominous, and forbidding monument of a novel of the �84 UK Miner’s strike (which was an equivalent labor defeat to the �85 Pan Am strike, but more violent and filled with drama.). If you aren’t in the right frame of mind, this frantic and wonderful read might seem like apocalyptic mumblings from a scary bum or a newscast from hell rather than a proper novel. Peace takes from John Dos Passo, Iain Sinclair, and James Ellroy and intertwines multiples narratives and characters, real and imagined events (the Brighton bombing and tensions with Libya), surveillance reports, and the execrable pop music of the era( from the apocalyptic �99 Red Balloons� to this wonderful excerpt from the banal all-star Africa tribute “Do they know its Christmas�, “There is world outside your window, and it’s a world of dread and fear.� A great phrase for all of Peace’s work). Here is a novel with influences ranging from Frankie goes to Hollywood to Zola albeit fairly relentless and grim one mired in corruption and violence, but it is worthwhile one, and one about an important event that has shaped our world.