The Alternative Hero

Oct 4, 2024 9:27 PM

Author:Tim Thornton

By the time most people hit 30, they've managed to do one of the following things:

1. Grow up

2. Quit idolising rock stars

3. Move on a bit from the music they were obsessed with at the age of 17.

Clive Beresford has failed to do all three. But that's about to change.

One unremarkable Saturday morning Clive sees the biggest alternative-pop star of them all walking down the high street with his dry-cleaning: Lance Webster, disgraced ex-singer of Thieving Magpies ('the biggest British band to emerge from the late-eighties indie-boom' Rolling Stone). Clive hatches a ramshackle plan to befriend his idol and grab the scoop of a lifetime - why did Webster burn out? The ensuing chaos forces both men to revisit the sweat, feedback, T-shirts, stage-dives, hitch-hikes, snakebites and hangovers of British alternative rock at the start of the nineties; to quote Lance Webster himself, 'before Britpop came along and fucked everything up'...

Reviews

Thornton explores the gentle complexities of this odd couple with wit and warmth

—— Independent

Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume

—— Jay McInerney

The indiest book of all time

—— Guardian

Brilliant depictions of the era...nails it so precisely

—— Stuart Evers , The Word

With The Alternative Hero, Tim Thornton has gone through the looking glass of obsessive fandom and brought back a hilarious, memorable, and hard-rocking tale

—— Madison Smartt Bell, author of 'All Souls' Rising'

A deliciously bittersweet novel that will touch the heart of anybody who ever fell in love with rock and roll

—— Mick Brown, author of 'Tearing Down the Wall of Sound'

Sparkly and authentic

—— Mark Hodkinson , The Times

It's the usual lad-lit comic romp ... but it's fresher, funnier and more amiable than most

—— Brandon Robshaw , Independent on Sunday

No one can make you feel quite like Stephen Fry can . . . Funny and tormentedly frank

—— Time Out

Hugely enjoyable . . . compulsively readable . . . Fry is excellent on the details of memory, too, and always able to embellish them with effortless erudition . . . this engaging, engrossing read is as honest a portrait of a young liar as one could hope to read

—— Scotsman

He is bubbly, funny and charming, and he gives his fans plenty of material if they want to speculate on why he is both so gifted and so wayward

—— The Times

The jokes . . . transcend the complexes of the joker, turning the Stephenesque into a national as well as a family treasure

—— Guardian

Not so much an autobiography, more a way of life; discursive, funny, sometimes almost unbelievably sad, opinionated, nostalgic and very infectious

—— Claire Rayner, New Statesman

Fry can be funny about anything

—— Good Book Guide

So charming and so acute that one cannot help forgiving him

—— Daily Express

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