How to Survive Puberty at 25: Revised Edition

Where do international adventures begin? Well, this one begins in the head of an imaginative mixed-race British girl who grows to be a frustrated journalist in recession-hit, racist Britain in the 1990s. Real Live Gangster is the true story of Nina Bhadreshwar, the British editor of the Real State magazine, later recruited by Death Row Records, the infamous LA-based record label that forever changed the music industry and not a few lives. An anorexic depressive, fed up of UK prejudice, Nina sets up her own magazine, the Real State, on her quest for "the real" in 1992. Finding a fellow seeker in Tupac Shakur during one of her graffiti missions to New York, they start a pen-friendship while her magazine is picked up by several international distributors. Decamping to Watts, South Los Angeles, just after the riots, her world is blown wide open by the injustice she witnesses. Her own delayed puberty kicks in, and with it, come the opportunities. Recruited by Westwood-based Death Row Records to help launch its own cultural magazine, Death Row Uncut, the mute British girl soon becomes one of the family and its voice and writer. But just as the dreams become reality, the cataclysm hits. This is the chronicle of the real-no more, no less-as told by a participator, not a theorist or a spectator.