Blitz Rats

Synopsis

Building a machine to bait a fresh blitz, forty years on.

East End siblings John and Liz are Blitz Rats: children who scavenge London’s bombed streets nightly for whatever the fires leave behind – jewellery, gramophones, a dead star’s tap shoes, shrapnel to scratch their own stories into concrete – while their father clears rubble by day, unable to bear the waste. Decades on, alone underground in 1986, John builds a machine from salvaged wartime parts, meant to ‘bait a fresh blitz’ and recreate the one period when his life had shape. Vaughan’s debut fuses wartime slang, cinema-programme headers and incantatory litanies of loot into something closer to prose-poetry than the conventional war novel – comic, tender and finally devastating.

Praise for This Book

‘A different, possibly unique, take on the collective memory of the heroic spirit of the London Blitz.’ —David Rose

‘Blitz Rats is a deathly hilarious and profound novel. While set in the past, its revelations are urgent now, as we seek to shelter humanity in the darkest of times. Chris Vaughan is a writer whose books will resonate for years to come.’ —Michael Bible