Beatniks

'When was the last time you created a generation?' Toby Litt's debut novel BEATNIKS is both testomony to Hipness and a warning against the dangers of its excesses. It is 1995. At a party in Bedford, Mary, the novel's narrator has just met Jack and Neal, a couple of angel-headed hipsters and Bedford's very own self-confessed 'Beats'. After joining them for a 'Beat Happening' at the public library, the three of them (and Neal's cat Koko) set off in Mary's 'P' Reg Vauxhall on a road trip to Brighton, where Jack is hell-bent on creating his literary magazine, Cafe Bohemia. But Mary soon discovers that Jack's obsession with hipness is overbearing. And it won't be until Neal has gone missing on Beachy Head, and Mary and Jack have gone on another road trip, that things will return to some sort of normality.