num_pages: 112
description: From Lucy Wadham, the bestselling author of The Secret Life of France , an autobiographical tale of bohemians, punk, the King's Road in the 1970s and family - part of a series of twelve books tied to the twelve lines of the London Underground. Lucy is a Chelsea girl, brought up off the King's Road in the seventies when punk was in full bloom. Her family comes in the wonderful tradition of English eccentrics. In Heads and Straights , she creates a funny, moving account of a family eager to escape the confines of class. Through interlocking tales of their extravagant and often self-destructive journeys away from the Circle line stops of Sloane Square, South Kensington and Gloucester Road, Lucy evokes the collision between conformism and bohemian excess and the complicated class antipathies that flourished in that particular time and place. In the end we are left wondering - is it ever possible to escape, or do we, in our travels, simply loop back on ourselves?
language: English
title: Heads and Straights: The Circle Line
publisher: Particular Books