The Bricks That Built the Houses

Rapper, performance artist, and poet Tempest has taken the main plot lines contained in her critically acclaimed hip-hop album Everybody Down and expanded them into this spectacularly moving debut novel. The work centers on two pairs of 20-somethings in modern London—a drug dealer named Harry and her best friend and "tough" Leon; and an erotic masseuse and dancer named Becky and her overprotective boyfriend Pete. As Tempest follows these four young people trying to find their place in the gritty underbelly of London and introduces readers to their friends and families, it becomes apparent that they are connected in seemingly preposterously coincidental ways. But Tempest justifies these coincidences. She has an ostensibly compulsive need to toss off new stories and characters: nearly every time readers meet characters, Tempest discusses their tangential backstories and family histories. Each tangent works as a perfect miniature short story, giving weight to the way it later connects back to the main plot. More importantly, the structure of the novel makes the coincidental nature of the plot necessary. The two overarching themes are the conflicting relationships with work and family—nearly every character comes from a broken home, and all work problematic jobs while secretly longing for middlebrow successes, such as owning a café. When it becomes clear that these characters and the plot are tangled together specifically by familial and business connections, the themes of the novel blossom into deeply felt catharses.