Skinhead

Simon Wellington's first book is set in the skinhead scene and written in the spirit of Richard Allen's rough, street-level novels. Its hero is Mark Heaney, an eighteen-year-old who lives by his own code: he fights when provoked, chases romance, and sings lead for a ska and oi group called the Juice Monkeys, whose gigs can ignite a club.

Mark's life shifts when his father loses his job and the family needs money. Mark leaves school in his final year and enlists in the Canadian army, where he trains as a medic. As his service grows longer, he earns his parachute wings and joins the Canadian Airborne Regiment, and the book follows him through combat and personal entanglements across the world. Six years on, he has grown into a grown man in every sense.

When his father dies in a workplace accident, Mark returns to his old neighbourhood in Vancouver to help his mother raise the younger children. He takes a job as a paramedic on the city's skid row, a demanding and largely unrewarded role that shows him more of street life. His favourite bar, the Skavoovee Tavern, is where he meets Terri Battle, one of the waitresses there, and before long he is working behind the bar as assistant manager.

The Skavoovee is more than a bar to Mark. Terri works there, his band started there, and it draws skinheads, punks and many other members of Vancouver's subcultures. When a group of American skinhead wannabes causes trouble inside, Mark confronts them and sends several to hospital. Their retaliation is to kidnap his younger sister, and the conflict escalates into open war. The question is whether Mark and his fellow commandos can come through it alive.