GB84 was published by Faber and Faber in 2004. It is Peace’s account of the 1984-85 miners’ strike — the defining political conflict of Thatcher’s Britain, when the National Union of Mineworkers under Arthur Scargill fought for a year against the government’s plan to close dozens of pits, destroy mining communities, and break the power of organized labor.
Peace tells the story through multiple voices: miners on the picket lines, their wives organizing support, police officers deployed against them, MI5 agents infiltrating the union, and the “scabs” who crossed picket lines. The structure mirrors the quartet: fragmented, repetitive, present-tense, immersive. The reader experiences the strike not as historical narrative but as lived trauma — the cold, the hunger, the violence, the betrayal, the slow grinding despair of a community under siege.
The novel’s most controversial element is its portrayal of state involvement: Peace depicts the strike not merely as an industrial dispute but as a deliberate act of class warfare, with the government deploying intelligence services, police violence, and media manipulation to ensure the miners’ defeat. This is not conspiracy theory but documented history — though Peace renders it with a novelist’s intensity that makes the familiar facts feel newly horrifying.
Collecting GB84
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 2004): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40