Chiswick 'Respectable' in Tale of Sexual Infatuation

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New Edition of Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky Published

Chiswick's most critically acclaimed author is back in the spotlight with the publication of a new edition of 'Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky.'

Published by Vintage and available from Waterstones this Thursday 6th May, the book, which has been described as a 'lost classic' was written by Patrick Hamilton.  

More widely known for his plays "Rope" and "Gaslight", Hamilton, though born in Hove, was a long-term resident of Chiswick residing at 2 Burlington Gardens. 

His milieu was the pub - he could recreate the cadences of its habitués with alarming clarity, and the boarding houses, Lyons Corner houses and three penny cinemas of the London suburbs.

"Twenty Thousand Street Under The Sky", though set largely in a pub off The Euston Road, has him placing many of his characters in Chiswick, and it is portrayed as a respectable neighbourhood in contrast to the seedier parts of The West End.

This trilogy of novels, the first published when he was only 24, gives a brilliant portrait of London in the late 1920's, and is also a truly remarkable study of obsession and the path to ruin. In this he is without rival.

Nick Robinson

Acknowledgements for Twenty Thousands Streets Under The Sky -

"No other English writer has written so acutely about sexual infatuation, embarrassment and self-delusion" Time Out

"Hamilton is a master at reproducing the inflamed talk of betrayed lives"
- The Independent

"Bleak and brilliant - an authentic lost classic"  The Guardian

May 5, 2004