Goodbye to Soho - Paperback

by Clayton Littlewood (Author)

Business in London's Soho is not going well and the designer menswear shop that Clayton Littlewood runs with his partner, Jorge Betancourt, is under threat. Will they survive? Following on from his award-winning diary Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho. Littlewood is back, watching the hookers, the gangsters, the rent boys and following the same strange characters who make up this strangest of villages. Will eccentric artist Raqib Shaw continue on his path to artistic immortality? Can Sue and Maggie, the Soho madams, keep the law at bay? What will become of Chico, the imprisoned ex-Diana Ross impersonator? And what of the Prince of Soho himself, Sebastian Horsley? Will America welcome him to its shores? Goodbye to Soho is a snapshot of modern London - a Samuel Pepys diary for the Soho subculture.

Author Biography

Clayton's books both began life as a blog with a cult following which became a popular column in The London Paper. His diaries are based on his personal experiences of running the Dirty White Boy clothes store with his partner Jorge Betancourt in Soho's Old Compton Street. Clayton captures a memorable moment in Soho's history and his writing finds humour and affection for the prostitutes, street cleaners, transsexuals, bag ladies and shoplifters that he encountered on one the most colourful street corners in the world. Reviews compared his first book to the diaries of Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf and Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories. In 2009 it was named Gay Times Book of the Year and was endorsed by celebrities such as Sir Elton John, Stephen Fry, Holly Johnson and Sebastian Horsley. In April 2009 Clayton turned the book into a play. It premiered at the Trafalgar Studios in London's West End and starred Clayton and the actor David Benson. It sold out. The play returned a year later for an extended run receiving reviews from, among others, Nicholas de Jongh and Paul Gambaccini. Now Clayton's written a sequel, Goodbye to Soho. www.claytonlittlewood.com