I love crime fiction that explores what James Ellroy so brilliantly called: “the private nightmare of public policy.” This is a perfect example. It’s set in London in 2006, in the wake of the 7/7 bombings, when the British government took an authoritarian turn and sought to introduce ID cards.
Nick Triplow's detective, Mark 'Max' Lomax, is a former member of the Metropolitan Police’s murky Special Demonstration Squad, ostensibly set up to infiltrate ‘subversive’ organizations. Coerced into investigating the death of a senior civil servant, he is forced to rely on the very people whose trust he once betrayed.
Every single character in this labyrinth of duplicity is trapped within a hell of their own making, compromised by the cost of their own ambitions.
'Like a darker, grimier version of Mick Herron's Slough House novels, this is a highly promising debut.' Mail on Sunday
'Mesmerising'. The Financial Times
A senior civil servant dies in suspicious circumstances. A sensitive file in his possession and evidence of contact with a human rights lawyer lead the authorities to believe he is a whistle-blower. This needs a police officer used to operating in the murky world between policing and intelligence.
DS Mark (Max) Lomax is a former Special Demonstration Squad officer - a Special Branch unit dedicated to infiltrating political and extremist groups, a world he thinks he…
Pauline Boty put a spell on me when I was writing one of my novels in 2007.
The only female British Pop Artist from the 1959-62 generation that also produced Peter Blake and David Hockney, she went to the Royal College of Art with them and lived in a house directly behind my current address in what was then Bohemian Labroke Grove. Like everyone who ever knew her, I became obsessed with this beautiful girl with a mercurial talent who died so tragically young.
By talking to all the important people in her life and diligently piecing the story of her short years together from the fragments that remain, Marc Kristal presents a vivacious and compelling portrait of a free spirit in a fascinating period of post-War, pre-Swinging London.
'How wonderful that one of those exciting and innovative women artists of the 60s should be recovered and celebrated in this way.'- JULIE CHRISTIE
'Brings the British pop artist, Pauline Boty, into vivid focus' - VANITY FAIR
Pauline Boty (1938 -1966) was a founding member of the British Pop Art movement and one of its very few women. She attended London's Royal College of Art at a watershed moment when its students included David Hockney,Peter Blake, R.B. Kitaj and Allen Jones. Dying tragically young at the age of 28, she is now seen as central to British Pop Art and…
Chris Fowler, the most original of all crime writers, sadly passed away in March 2023, just before his 70th birthday. He managed to cram at least three lifetimes into those years; this is the last in a triptych of memoirs that cover growing up in Post-war London and his career in the film business.
This book meditates on his life as an author as well as his last two years in COVID-stricken London and is as valuable a history of those strange days as it is a typically generous resource for writers.
Chris's brilliant Bryant & May series of novels was born when he discovered crime fiction's “greatest secret” was “that you could smuggle any subject you wanted into it." This is just the tip of the treasures he left.
'A delight . . . a glorious, witty and life-affirming ragbag of autobiography, cultural commentary and hard-won wisdom.' ANDREW TAYLOR, author of The Shadows of London
'Perceptive, wise and illuminating . . . an unmissable farewell.' Barry Forshaw, FINANCIAL TIMES
'The most hilarious, life-affirming book you'll read this year.' SAGA magazine
'Wit and wisdom that make every page turn . . . what a fine talent the world has lost.' STARBURST
This is the memoir Christopher Fowler always wanted to write about 'writing'.
It's the story of how a young bookworm growing up in a house where there was nothing…
My book charts the rise of Gothic music during the Eighties as a reaction to the profound social change of the Thatcher-Reagan years. Spawned by punk bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, and The Cure were architects of a new music that distilled the darkness of the times. Shaped by the Cold War, Miners' Strike, The Troubles, and AIDS, its gender-fluid, outlaw imagery, and innovative, atmospheric music spoke to a generation of alienated youth. By 1990, Goth had imprinted its will on the cultural landscape as deeply as the era's politics.
Written by a lifelong Goth, teenage music journalist, and acclaimed noir novelist, this is a personal and social history of the genre that refuses to give up the ghost.
Through Dazi's description and characterisation of his troubled main character, he perfectly describes the mindset of his alienated protagonist. He makes a believable link between thoughts and actions, and because of this, the book flows nicely and leaves you thinking about it long after you have turned the final page.
Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.
I love this book because it is well-written, prescient, and has withstood the test of time!
This book contains many facets of wisdom that reveal themselves to readers of any age. It is a good story and, at its core, a message that has gone on haunting me, that is, the joy and importance of reading.
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.
Over 1 million copies sold in the UK.
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
