GO
Now a major film, called JET TRASH, starring Robert Sheehan and Sofia Boutella
Problems at home?
Ripped off your boss?
Think you've killed someone?
It's time to go.
Lee, Sol and Vix are on the run - from police, gangsters, parents... themselves. As they travel through Asia on separate quests, their paths keep crossing. But it doesn't matter how far you go, reality always catches up with you...
UK
Italy
Germany
Sweden
'Imagine having to run an obstacle course in the early hours of the morning while processed cheese is poured into your ears. That's what my job was like. Piece of shit job that it was, it provided a necessary supplement to the loose change I got off the dole - I mean, I liked to eat as well as smoke. I collected glasses, Friday and Saturday nights, at Dazzler, this club in Deptford. The sort of place that after one look at the entrance - the garish light puked over the pavement through the narrow doorway, the spangly silver sign, the dickie bows of the heavies - I'd cross the street to avoid. To me it all said gorgonzola city.'
I wrote this novel when I was in my early twenties, and it leans heavily on my rather chaotic life at the time – on the dole and squatting in London, working as a guidebook researcher in China, doing odd jobs in Hong Kong, looking for the party in India.
I was paid an advance of a thousand pounds by a small press and faced with the problem of how to write a novel with only that. So I went to India and lived on a farm in the mountains, staying in the room next to the buffalo, and hiked into the forest to write longhand all day. I eked that money out for about five months. I ended up writing all the London sections in India and the Asia sections in London.
After the small press published it, it got good reviews, and got picked up by a much bigger publisher, and ended up selling loads of copies, forty thousand I think.
Finally, after nearly twenty years, it has been made into a film, JET TRASH.
REVIEWS
“Alongside Alex Garland and William Sutcliffe, Lewis is one of the pioneers of new travel fiction. And of the three he is the most in tune with experience of traveling and the possibilities it offers fiction.”
— NICHOLAS BLINCOE, OBSERVER
“The pace and wit of Elmore Leonard with Alan Bennettish realism... highly accomplished and enjoyable.”
— THE TIMES
“Confident, sharp as a tack, fast paced and blackly funny from beginning to end.”
— BIG ISSUE
“Go drags you halfway around the world and expects you to keep up but you are happy to do it.”
— OBSERVER
“Read of the week... an entertaining read from a promising young writer who puts an often amusing spin on subject matter it’s all too easy to be cynical about.”
— THE BIG ISSUE IN THE NORTH
“Sharp, fast, funny.”
— I-D MAGAZINE
“South London gunplay and backpacker slack, jet trash characters with gold dust prose - Simon Lewis mixes it all up with style.”
— TOBY LITT, WRITER