White Rabbit snares Bracewell's London 'eulogy'

White Rabbit is to publish a "seductive act of pop cultural time-travel" about London 40 years ago by Michael Bracewell. 

Publisher Lee Brackstone  acquired world rights to Souvenir by Michael Bracewell from Antony Harwood at Antony Harwood Ltd. It will be published on 2nd September 2021 in hardback, e-book and audio. 

White Rabbit said: “Souvenir is a vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s – the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980.” 

Writer Philip Hoare described it as “a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had”.  

Bracewell said: “I am deeply indebted to Lee Brackstone for both his vision as a publisher and his belief in my writing. In Souvenir I have tried to recall a time between the late 1970s and mid 1980s when London felt eerie and twilit yet filled with new energy and daring creativity. The soundtrack was exuberant and elegiac, often simultaneously. Music for the dusk of the old mechanical city and the dawn of its digital successor. The history and influence of pop and rock music is vast and complex. White Rabbit champions literature that attempts to chart the terrain."

Brackstone said: “Michael Bracewell is a once in a generation writer whose understanding of pop as an engine of modernism and change is constantly illuminating. I am thrilled to rekindle my relationship with him after our adventure with the Roxy Music book with Souvenir, a seductive and highly original act of pop cultural time-travel.”