Lost Boys

**You've seen the hit Netflix drama, Adolescence. Now read the book that explains it.**



'So compelling' Financial Times

'Remarkable' Sunday Times



'Grimly fascinating' Pandora Sykes

'Sobering' Guardian

'Brave, clear and necessary' Observer

'The one book that everyone should read this summer' Prospect



An astonishing undercover investigation into the paranoid and misogynistic subcultures of the manosphere, by the Orwell Prize-longlisted author of Hired.





Rarely has there seemed a more confusing time to be a man. This uncertainty has spawned an array of bizarre and harmful underground subcultures, collectively known as the 'manosphere', as men search for new forms of belonging.





In Lost Boys, acclaimed journalist James Bloodworth delves into these worlds and asks: what does their emergence say about Western society? Why are so many men susceptible to the sinister beliefs these groups promote? And what can we do about their pernicious encroachment upon our social and political spheres? Along the way, he enlists in a bootcamp for 'alpha males', dissects cultural figures including Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and accompanies modern day Hugh Hefners as they broadcast their jet-set lifestyles to millions of followers.





Combining compulsive memoir with powerful reporting, Lost Boys is an essential guide to the contradictions in contemporary masculinity.



James Bloodworth is a journalist whose work has appeared in The Times, New York Review of Books, Guardian, Prospect and elsewhere. He is also the author of The Myth of Meritocracy and Hired: Six Months in Low-Wage Britain.



Brave, clear and necessary ... A steady, smart, sometimes agonising account of the rising influence of the manosphere



Bloodworth gets up close and personal, grappling with how and why ancient myths of masculinity are being resurrected ... It's this tension - between wanting to look away and the need to engage - that makes Bloodworth's book so compelling



The sheer, Dickensian range of the miscreants that Bloodworth has assembled is remarkable ... This is an impressive feat of research



Bloodworth is one of those rare journalists who sets the standard for everybody else ... [Bloodworth] maintains an uncompromising moral clarity but backs it up with the sort of forensic and nuanced handling of detail rarely seen from other polemicists ... The one book that everyone should read this summer



Sobering



[An] absorbing look at one of contemporary society's most disturbing trends



Timely and disturbing ... A crucial exploration of the modern masculinity ecosystem ... If you found Netflix's Adolescence to be eye-opening, then James Bloodworth's Lost Boys is the perfect companion piece: an in-depth, personal and authoritative account of the spaces where this new misogyny takes hold



Timely



Exceptional... Bloodworth is the best young left wing writer Britain has produced in years



A very discomforting book, no matter what your politics might be... very good.



Potent, disturbing and revelatory... [Bloodworth] sets out to see something we should know more about than we do, and he tells the story of what he found well



An extraordinary and unsettling journey into the way modern Britons work. It is Down and Out In Paris and London for the gig economy age