A disturbing and beautiful novel with an oblique, unexpected approach to the horrors of war. If the ‘horrors of war’ is an off-putting phrase for you take heart, this is not about the violent frontline of World War I but its consequences and effects on those directly and indirectly involved. The heroine is a young girl called Lucy, a wonderfully touching character, who is taken into the dark woods, where fairy tale and true-life horror overlap. This is a profound book, but it is also often funny and moving, ultimately illustrating the human capacity for kindness and love.
This is a classic collection about the lost souls of American society who have not only failed to realise the American Dream but have been wrecked by it. Outcasts, drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals, the desolate and the damned. These are stories told from the inside rather than with an anthropological observation; their narrators share the experience of those who live by different rules or no rules at all, their narrative frameworks are skewed towards the psychotic and surreal. But the language is what makes this collection exceptional. With the brilliance and sharpness of a diamond, Johnson’s prose tears his characters and narratives apart and puts them together again into something like poetry.
Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found and lost again. The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young, unnamed man, reeling from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, his mind at once clouded and made brilliantly lucid by these drugs. In the course of his adventures, he meets an assortment of people, who seem as alienated and confused as he; sinners, misfits, the lost, the damned, the desperate and the forgotten. Our of their bleak, seemingly…
London is a major player in this novel which explores the boundaries and complications of communication and relationships in terms of gender, sexuality, generation and class. Insightful and compelling.
'A MASTERPIECE. THIS SEARING TALE OF LOVE, SEX AND CLASS WILL RESONATE FOR GENERATIONS TO COME' OWEN JONES
'Electric and intimate' Guardian
'Impossibly, ineffably beautiful' Russell T Davies
'Intoxicating' Irish Times
This city stops for no-one. Not the half-naked boozers, stoners, and cruisers, the hen parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried fags. It's June 2019 in London and everyone has converged on the parks, beer gardens and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive.
Everyone but Maggie. She's 30, pregnant and broke. Faced with…
Manchester 1849. Elizabeth Gaskell, newly famous author of Mary Barton, visits a young Irish prostitute in the New Bailey prison. The girl is about to be discharged onto the Manchester streets, where her old life of poverty and violence await her. Elizabeth is determined to help her, but few people will employ an ex-prostitute from prison. In desperation, Elizabeth writes to Charles Dickens for advice. Based on the real correspondence between Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, Elizabeth and Ruth explores the relationship between two women from very different social worlds. It also tells the story of how Elizabeth was inspired to base her novel Ruth on her association with this young girl.
