A lovesong to London in the early 80s: a pre-computer, pre-digital, pre-mostmodern, New Wave age

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant

'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside

'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare

'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan Coe

A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...

Souvenir is alive to the senses and seasons dressing London . . . Bracewell has a poet's gift for locating essence in detail . . . Souvenir reaches back across decades of exsanguinating Conservatism, New Labour, austerity and gentrification to find intimations of today's malaise