Kicking — Leslie Dick

Set in the London and New York underground culture's of the '70s and '80s, Kicking tracks the adventures of a group of close friends through the ambiguous pleasures and dangers of those years. Connie West's attachment to Mikey Stour begins one Sunday afternoon in 1969 on an expedition to the romantic wilderness of Highgate cemetery. Their relationship over the next twenty years is a convoluted one, intersected by the lives of friends and lovers, among them Iris, whose eccentric path is to have a strange impact on their own. Connie discovers that the emotional imprint of one's past never dies but lies buried under the surface until, alive and kicking, sometimes as comic epiphany.

Here is a witty and psychologically acute portrayal of a vibrant world of artists and writers, of drug addiction and the impulse toward self-destruction, of all the ferocious loves and betrayals that change people forever.

Leslie Dick is the author of Without Falling (City Lights), a novel. She divides her time between London and Los Angeles, where she teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.