Overview

Set amidst the London riots of 2011, Benjamin Rudge is a story of society’s concept of what constitutes right and wrong, beginning with a protest about the shooting by police of a man suspected to be engaged in crime and going on to involve looting, theft, arson and murder. Throughout the course of the novel, we meet absent and disengaged fathers, police officers who question their role in modern communities, politicians who seek to apportion blame, residents wishing only to protect their homes and their livelihoods and the varying agendas of the rioters.   As the mobs rampage through the streets and London erupts into chaos, Benjamin Rudge, the autistic son of a single mother, struggles to make sense of what is happening around him.   With dialogue and events taken from those involved at the time, Benjamin Rudge presents a disturbing picture of a country where the rule of law and order is forsaken.    The idea for the story was suggested, originally, by the author’s re-reading of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, which was set during the Gordon riots of 1780, and came to fruition through his reading of Michael Matthews’s account, The Riots, of the experiences of police officers on the front line during the riots and the interviews conducted by the Guardian newspaper with the rioters themselves, Reading the Riots. 

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9781803810430

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James Warden was a teacher for forty years and retired in 2006. He now enjoys his retirement as much as he enjoyed his time in the education service. He writes every morning. He acts in several Norwich theatres and this experience informs his writing. His stage adaptation of Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning was performed at the Sewell Barn Theatre in November 2009. His original play, Letters from a Boy in the Trenches, which was based on the letters of a WW1 soldier, was performed in Marchington, Staffordshire in 2015. He and his wife travel as much as possible. They have taken several holidays in Mediterranean resorts – the basis for his first novel, Three Women of a Certain Age, which was published in July 2010, and Bingham Goes to Cannes, to be published in 2024. His play scripts for children include the one that formed the basis for his children’s story, The Great Gobbler and his Home Baking Factory at the North Pole, which he wrote in 1982 and published in December 2010. He has three sons and they inspired three of his novels – The Vampire’s Homecoming, which was published in 2011, and The One-eyed Dwarf, published in 2012 and The Haunting of Thornham Staithe published in 2022.

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