Book excerpt: Rat Race is a semi-autobiographical novel set in the 1980s in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. It focuses on Paul, who has just graduated and wants to be a writer. He faces overwhelming pressure from everyone around him, however, to ‘get on’ and join the Rat Race, against his will and in sharp contrast to the alternative lifestyle he wants to live. Pretty soon he finds himself on the scrapheap and having to compromise his beliefs in order to make something of himself. Rat Race is one year in his life, charting his fluctuating fortunes, set against a background of the music and fashion of the alternative scene at the time. It is also a love story, as he meets and falls in love with the girl of his dreams, and all the trials and tribulations that brings with it. Rat Race is an alternative view of growing up in the 1980s, the flipside, a savage indictment of the Thatcher regime, punctuated with some of the writer’s own poems written at the time, which provide a juxtaposition to the sometimes hard- hitting and brutal prose. Rat Race is a novel about many things, but most of all the pressures on the young to achieve at any cost in the get- rich-quick society in which they find themselves.