Advance Praise for Blitz Rats:

“A vital and utterly original work! The best British novel I have read in the last decade and, I think, the freshest and most original debut since Trainspotting.” - Bill Broady, author of The Night Soil Men

“Blitz Rats is a deathly hilarious and profound novel. While set in the past, its revelations are urgent now, as we seek to shelter humanity in the darkest of times. Chris Vaughan is a writer whose books will resonate for years to come.” - Michael Bible, author of The Terrible

“A different, possibly unique, take on the collective memory of the heroic spirit of the London Blitz, inventive in plot, characters and, above all, linguistic inventiveness.” - David Rose, author of Vault

From Salt Publishing:

Building a machine to bait a fresh blitz, forty years on…

East End siblings John and Liz are Blitz Rats: children who scavenge London’s bombed streets nightly for whatever the fires leave behind – jewellery, gramophones, a dead star’s tap shoes, shrapnel to scratch their own stories into concrete – while their father clears rubble by day, unable to bear the waste. Decades on, alone underground in 1986, John builds a machine from salvaged wartime parts, meant to ‘bait a fresh blitz’ and recreate the one period when his life had shape. Vaughan’s debut fuses wartime slang, cinema-programme headers and incantatory litanies of loot into something closer to prose-poetry than the conventional war novel – comic, tender and finally devastating.

Forthcoming from Salt, August 27th, 2027.