"‘Autonomy’ was a massive wakeup call for me. I bought the album the day it came out, I got the bus after school and it was in a silver plastic bag. When I got home and put it on I knew the singles, but when I got to ‘Autonomy’ it was genuinely a new kind of rock music. “There’s no way I can ever separate the fact that I was aware it was from my town. If it had been from Düsseldorf I would have been mind blown, but I was more mind blown it was from Manchester, because it could have been from Düsseldorf. I knew it couldn’t have been from Los Angeles and sounded like The Doobie Brothers, Fleetwood Mac or Jackson Browne and knowing it now I don’t think it could have come from London. “London at that time was very dominated by the sound of The Clash and The Pistols and in spite of what people like to say it was quite testosteroney and straight, certainly compared to the Buzzcocks and Magazine. Wire were a different matter, they had an arch femininity and an intellectual aspect about them, but Buzzcocks sounded like my environment, in much the same way Joy Division were going to a year later, the way The Smiths did a few years after that and the way The Fall did. “I might have been projecting, but when I put it all together it sounded so modern and so Manchester and it gave me an insight into my city, modern Manchester. I was always looking for clues, for a key to pick up, to open and go through the next door as a musician and a thinker and I probably still am, that’s the best way I can describe it. ‘Autonomy’ was like a key, it was ‘This riff is very, very deliberate, it’s not bluesy, it’s very bold and it doesn’t sound anything like classic rock.’ It’s really in your face, the words are very clever and sang in quite an effeminate, challenging vocal. I love The Clash but to me it was better than ‘White Riot’, it was this cross between aggression and arty. “The punks I’d see around Manchester personified that, they looked like little thugs and they were very effeminate, so again it’s that thing about the feminisation of rock music. I hadn’t realised that actually, but almost everything I’ve mentioned has got a non-testosterone aspect to it. That was quite a moment and being that age, fourteen, fifteen, you’re so fearless and open to being free, well I was anyway, I was looking for things to give me juice to fire that fearlessness up. I think you see through bullshit really well when you’re that age, when you get older you think too much!"

"Andrew Smith (Winger; Grasshopper Jungle) pens a phenomenal novel about life's many detours, told in the unforgettable voice of an epileptic teenager with heterochromatic eyes (one blue, one green) and a strange history. When 16-year-old Finn Easton was seven years old, a dead horse that was being transported to a rendering plant fell "one hundred sideways miles" off a bridge and landed on Finn and his mother. The impact broke Finn's back and killed his mother. His epilepsy, which he may grow out of, is a "souvenir" of the accident, and if he does grow out of it, he suspects he may miss the way the seizures empty the words out of his head. Finn measures the world in miles instead of minutes, because he believes "distance is more important than time." His crush, Julia Bishop, a Chicago transplant living with her aunt and uncle because of a devastating secret, admires Finn's perspective on life. The moment he meets Julia, Finn wonders "how many atoms from the same calamities out there in the universe our body shared.... Maybe my right hand and her left hand both came from the same supernova." Julia, ever astute, gets why Finn named his dog Laika, is patient with him during his wild mood swings when he's returning from a "blank out" (seizure) and, most importantly, she loves Finn back. Which makes it crushing for both Finn (and readers) when Julia must return to Chicago--the very place where she was victim of a tragedy that makes Finn wish he "could push the world back all those miles with my bare hands and make it change direction," even if it means they'd never have met. Throughout the novel, Finn suffers from an identity crisis as he questions whether or not he's the product of his father's bestselling cult-classic novel, The Lazarus Door, starring a protagonist with the teen's name, heterochromatic eyes, seizures, and scars identical to the ones he has on his back from his post-accident surgery. So Finn sets out on a road trip with his best friend, the memorable Cade Hernandez, to figure out the ending to his story, when an unexpected accident rewrites their future. Smith's sly commentary on today's school system ("designed to make us all the same," in Cade's words) intertwines with the story of Finn's desperation to break out and be different--not a reproduction of anyone's expectations. The well-rounded supporting characters and the Southern California setting make for a welcome departure from the usual glitz of Los Angeles life. Hilarious and wise, 100 Sideways Miles is an addictive and panoramic read about the intersecting--and divergent--paths that lie ahead. Breathtakingly good."