It was the long hot summer of 1979 in London, and Michael Berlin is 15, a skater, wild, adrift and out of control. With school over, he lands his dream job at Skateboard Kingdom and wastes no time getting in over his head. He and his friends rush toward a summer of youthful excess played out against a soundtrack of Bowie and Blondie in the shadow of Thatcher coming to power in a country on the brink.

With humour and heart, he recounts his bad-boy antics and the resilience and refuge that intense male friendships can provide. In between trying to hold down a job and getting stoned, he’s wrangling his untamed, uncontrollable dog, Sasha, whose outlaw spirit takes him across the neighborhood, breaking into local shops and people’s homes.

What was supposed to be the best summer of his life turns into a dizzying spiral of self-destruction that takes him through stealing from the till to getting into scrapes. By the summer’s end, he’s lost his girlfriend, his job, his motorbike. Still, broke and broken-hearted, he revs on until he’s caught up in a turf war with one of West London’s most feared youth gangs and forced to confront his own vulnerabilities for the first time.

This energetically spun memoir chronicles a lost generation, lads coming of age in Thatcher’s Britain, that have experienced sex, drugs and disaffection way too early amid the chaos and craziness of the 70s.