Salt signs 'unforgettable' novel The Peckham Experiment by Ware

Salt has signed Guy Ware’s The Peckham Experiment, an "unforgettable" novel exploring post-war idealism. 

Co-director Jen Hamilton-Emery acquired world all language rights, including North America, directly from the author. The novel will be published on 15th November 2022. 

"This utterly engaging new novel from Guy Ware is a compelling descent into the realms of post-war social engineering," said co-director Chris Hamilton-Emery. "A descent because the imagined utopias have become so notoriously degraded, a little like the memories and moral universe of Charlie, the novel’s central narrator. In a post-truth world of political cynicism and populism, Ware’s novel is an unforgettable and deeply necessary warning." 

The Peckham Experiment follows twins Charlie and JJ whose ideals are thwarted by the political events and corruption after the Second World War. The publisher wrote: "Sons of a working-class Communist family, growing up in the radical Peckham Experiment and orphaned by the Blitz, the twins emerge from the war keen to build the New Jerusalem.

"In 1968, JJ’s ideals are rocked by the fatal collapse of a tower block his council and Charlie’s development company have built.  When the entire estate is demolished in 1986 JJ retires, apparently defeated.  Now he is dead and Charlie, preparing for the funeral, relives their history, their family and their politics.  It’s a story of how we got to where we are today told in a voice – opinionated, witty, garrulous, indignant, guilty, deluded and, as the night wears on, increasingly drunken – that sucks us in to both the idealism and the corruption it depicts, leaving us wondering just where we stand."  

Ware commented: "The original 1930s Peckham Experiment promoted the wellbeing of working-class families from a fabulous modernist building, just around the corner from where I live. My narrator – a gay octogenarian Communist property developer with a taste for fine brandy, an ’Easy Rider’ mobility scooter and a dead twin brother – played there as a child and now lives in the converted private block. Eighty years of love, sex, idealism and betrayal, of compromise, political corruption and decrepitude, has left him physically back where he started, but stranded in a very different country. Still, he won’t take it lying down. The Peckham Experiment is the most personal book I’ve written, and I’m delighted to have Salt bring it to the world."