An unforgettable novel -- about carp fishing, madness, driving and love. From fishing for carp and trout in the waters of East Sussex, to driving the Dream Car across the cinematic America of his imagination, Josh's childhood had always been fuelled by the need to escape: from his father, always up to his oily elbows in Swarfega; his mother, just fed up with it all; Mr Chittenden next door, the grim gamekeeper who put a gun to his head and poached his own life. Years later, the moment Josh meets F in the tea shop at Highgate Ponds, he knows she is his last chance. Josh's old world disintegrates right there and together they travel to America to be with her family. But all families have a way of driving you mad. Slamming the front door and driving away is sometimes the only way out. Joyride is the story of Josh and F's journey across that vast country, fleeing their separate pasts. It is quite unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.

Soon after Dexter Petley began writing down his observations of people on the borders of rural Kent and Sussex during the 1960s and 1970s, he realised that his stories were acquiring a broader significance. Between the riverbank where he taught himself to fish and the secondary modern where gardening and smallholding were on the curriculum, he witnessed the lives of a demobbed generation who were still adjusting to post-war Britain, surviving hand-to-mouth, eking out a living mending cars, recycling scrap metal or hop-picking. This fractured landscape, carried like an heirloom since boyhood, has allowed Petley to untangle the fragments of his own life, from the loss of his first love to the nomadic existence he has been living ever since, in London, Africa and France. Here is an unsentimental memoir of exceptional quality. Reminiscent of Laurie Lee and H.E. Bates, each story is peopled by vivid, earthy characters who gravitate around the lakes and ponds and rivers that have flowed through Dexter Petley's life.