The Cuckoo Cage Book Launch with Pete Kalu, Karline Smith and Ra Page.

Join Blackwell’s for the launch of The Cuckoo Cage, a collection of twelve specially commissioned stories that seek to challenge the Americanised concept of “the superhero”. Reading on the night will be contributors Pete Kalu and Karline Smith. The evening will be hosted by editor and Comma Press founder Ra Page.

About the book:

The superhero of comic books and blockbuster movies may be a quintessentially American invention, forever saving the world in skin-tight spandex. But the cultural DNA of the superhero can arguably be traced to a much older, more progressive, British tradition: the larger-than-life folk heroes of historical protests – General Ludd, Captain Swing, Lady Skimmington, and others; semi-fictional identities that ordinary protestors adopted, often dressing up in the process.

In this unique experiment, twelve authors have been tasked with resurrecting that tradition: to spawn a new generation of present-day British superheroes, willing to bring the fight back to British shores and to more progressive causes. From the dimension-jumping statue-toppler, to the shape-shifting single mum raiding supermarkets to stock local food banks… these figures offer unlikely new insights into shared, centuries-old political causes, and usher in a new league of proud, British (social justice) warriors…