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The writing's on the wall
CALUM BARNES recommends a novel about a graffiti enthusiast decoding the signs of the times during the 1965 Watts riots

Graffiti Palace
by AG Lombardo
(Serpent's Tail, £14.99)

“A RIOT is the language of the unheard,” Martin Luther King once famously remarked and in Graffiti Palace AG Lombardo concerns himself with the language of those unheard during the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles.

The novel's protagonist Americo Monk finds himself on the opposite side of town when the riots break out and it's through his peregrinations that we experience the maelstrom of those febrile August days.

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