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Email a friendNo way out of the ghetto
(Sunday 06 April 2008)
The Dirty South by Alex Wheatle
(Serpent's Tail, £9.99)
BRIXTON teenager Dennis Huggins's future is bleak, even though his family knows the dangers and looks out for him. His contemporaries are not so lucky and it is inevitable that he is drawn into a racist world of drug dealing, guns, black-on-black violence and murder.
Dennis is a third generation Jamaican and his grandmother and father have told him of the battles that they won and the many more to be fought.
However, there is love and there are dreams and, in Dennis's case, there is hope.
For the others, there is no alternative to the ghetto culture.
GWYN GRIFFITHS