One you can belong to without the piles of money or the suit and tie.' Yes, there's thieving and violence, but there is also loyalty, friendship and a profound understanding of the corrupting power of money … You'll never rid London of the Borribles that London is and always will be there. The Borribles, she believes, 'give voice to that experience of the other London, living poor in the big city, making good with nothing. Yet the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider, and perhaps, even more dangerously, is becoming more accepted,' said Rose de Larrabeiti. 'The books were a response to the political climate of Thatcher's Britain, and today here we are wrestling with many of the same issues: jobless young people and a deepening mistrust of the police. And the late De Larrabeiti's daughters believe the anti-authoritarian titles are just as relevant today. Time, with an effusive introduction from Miéville. Is now releasing the three titles as individual ebooks for the first The three books had been out of print as individual titles for overġ0 years, with an omnibus edition the only version available. The book was published in 1986, a year later, but by Pan.

On 6 October, described by the BBC as 'a night of horrific violence between the police and hundreds of black and white youths', 58 policemen and 24 others were taken to hospital. The letter was sent on 8 October 1985, just two days after policeman Keith Blakelock was stabbed to death in a riot in Tottenham.

'The battle between the law and lawlessness is glamourised and given a status, which we cannot appear to condone in children's literature now that Britain has entered a new era in which this battle is a daily reality.' 'It is a novel that pits a gang of lawless young people against the police,' wrote the publisher in a letter reproduced by Doctorow on his blog Boing Boing. But in 1985, following riots in Brixton and Tottenham, publisher Collins reneged on releasing the third book in the trilogy, The Borribles: Across the Dark Metropolis, saying 'the present climate of urban Britain is not the climate in which we would wish to publish this book'. The stories have drawn fans from China Miéville to Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow, who told the Guardian they were 'one of the origin nodes of urban fantasy, a trilogy of books that are always wicked and never nasty, and a love poem to London'.

The borribles